Custom Feature: OnlyTabs - A premium sheet metal tab and slot feature

Derek_Van_Allen_BD

-Link to feature up front-

A long time ago in the distant year of late 2024 our sheet metal obsessed production company was evaluating our CAD options and found ourselves checking out Onshape as an alternative to our old licenses of Solidworks. There were two main barriers in the way of our adoption, support for sheet metal cones, and a sheet metal tab and slot feature. Cone support came very quickly after we began our evaluation which gave us the confidence to switch, and featurescript had partial solutions for the tab and slot support already that we could make some use of for some projects. The problem is none of the other public facing scripts support sheet metal geometry, let alone curved sheet metal geometry where you want tabs to smoothly roll along edges of your parts. And forget about cones, those were brand new at the time. So I reached out to @Caden_Armstrong to help build a sheet metal tab and slot script that covers more of our use cases and support rolled geometry on active sheet metal parts because at the time I was brand new to Onshape and knew barely anything about featurescript. I could generate the slots pretty easily with a thicken operation, but the thing I really needed was help with was a feature that generated the tabs.

Through a full year of iteration since then OnlyTabs has become a full featured tab and slot feature that supports all major surface types that sheet metal supports.

As long as Onshape treats the surface as a main sheet metal face (no bend faces at the moment) it will allow you to tabs extending from the edges you select. The only prerequisite is that the edge needs not to be part of a rip or bend joint to start with. You don't even necessarily have to specify a slot scope on your parts if you want to draw only the tabs. There are numerous spacing options available for tab placement whether you're looking to drive by a strict number, or best fit spacing, or strict spacing from one end of your path to the other. It even supports tabs spanning across multiple edges in a chain all at once.

Slot clearances are accounted for, chamfer depths for the tips of the tabs, offset spacing from the ends of the chain if you want to maintain an equal pitch but set 1" in from that side and .5" in from that other side.

I even included a randomizer to make it impossible for your fabricators to install panels backwards.

The working principle of the current iteration of this feature uses as much native sheet metal functionality as possible, both because I tried everything else first and ran into impenetrable bugs, and because performance in previous iterations was not worth publishing publicly. This version however, has pretty dang good performance for a custom sheet metal feature.

I don't think I'll ever actually send out a tab and slot joint with 200 randomized tabs and slots, but it's comforting to know that I can, should the need arise.

Subscribe to my OnlyTabs.

Derek_Van_Allen_BD

Special thanks again to @Caden_Armstrong for the original iteration of this feature and getting me into featurescript development in the first place, although very little of that original implementation remains I have to give credit where it's due. Also special thanks to @lougallo for the help diagnosing the black box of sheet metal attributes during the many many refactoring attempts made in the last few months to get this to the place it is today.

Konst_Sh

Did you considered some alternative feature naming, like TabsHUB?

Derek_Van_Allen_BD

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/126280#Comment_126280

Many other alternative names were suggested by people I work with. The welders had some really colorful ones. This is the one safe for publishing

Caden_Armstrong

OnlyTabs seems misleading if it also does slots.
Congrats on the effort. I always enjoy seeing my initial features get expanded on and turned into absolute powerhouses of automation - and seeing my clients turn into FeatureScript experts themselves.

Derek_Van_Allen_BD

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/126285#Comment_126285

At first the justification was the early builds only did the tab generation, but now my justification is our sheet metal studios feature trees end up being one sheet metal convert, a couple move faces, and 90% this feature. For some builds it's all you need.