Sheet metal flange / design approach question

lars_rengersen

I'm in the process of converting my 1967 Volvo Amazon wagon to full electric and currently designing my battery boxes.
Those are made of beams to hold the battery modules and a box skin made out of 1,5mm stainless steel.
I want to have a less welds as possible and will have the sheet metal cut and bend by a company in an automated way based on my step file.
There is one panel that I expect I should be able to integrate in the sheet metal, but cannot manage to create that. So now I have drawn it as a separate part.

Looking at the 'fold out' there should be space on the sheet metal cutout to attach the top to the main box already so only three sides need to be welded.
My document is found here.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/8bd796190fee12a71ab3b375/w/86b92d69622e369a4335bf62/e/b834e451411498c3c900e7b0
Hope you have some suggestions how to improve my design to accomplish this.

emagdalenaC2i

Sure, you just should need to sort a few features... But in this example actually you will need to work a lot because there are other sketches and flanges that use geometry created in previous features

I recomended in this cases to create a solid before to set the geometry that you want and then create a sheet metal part based on that geometry.
Take a look to this example https://cad.onshape.com/documents/336406118cf7692acbf9e3b7/w/8df4b99dc225af4a747daa66/e/5937d38120a8c96844da9c81

emagdalenaC2i

I think you can create a Tab feature before of the Finish Sheet Metal model 1 feature

Here is the document https://cad.onshape.com/documents/336406118cf7692acbf9e3b7/w/8df4b99dc225af4a747daa66/e/5937d38120a8c96844da9c81

lars_rengersen

Great thanks, also for showing the implementation in a document. I tried that before but probably did not add the correct coindicents so the tab could not be created. Now I managed to replicate it.
That does trigger another question though. Is it also possible to join the top?
I was trying to create a flange from there, but that did not work.
Looking at the fold out, in terms of sheet metal it should be possible, right?

But how do I implement that in the design?
Moving the face of the small bend piece in between the panel does not work.

emagdalenaC2i

Sure, you just should need to sort a few features... But in this example actually you will need to work a lot because there are other sketches and flanges that use geometry created in previous features

I recomended in this cases to create a solid before to set the geometry that you want and then create a sheet metal part based on that geometry.
Take a look to this example https://cad.onshape.com/documents/336406118cf7692acbf9e3b7/w/8df4b99dc225af4a747daa66/e/5937d38120a8c96844da9c81

lars_rengersen

Wow, thanks! That helps a lot. I am quite new to CAD and therefore not very familiar to all the possibilities. Therefore I only used the functionalities I know and tried to create the box panel by panel. This integrated approach is much faster and easier.

While trying to replicate what you did and learn to implement it myself I do run into an issue though.
I'm not able to select the bend line in the bottom that I want to. Needs to be extrude 16 or 24 I guess, but only mirror 1 gets selected.


Probably that has to do with the way I created the sketch for extrude remove the shape. In my case sketch 37.

Can fully understand what you did in the example to accomplish the connection. Hope you can help me out on that one as well.
Thanks in advance! And thanks a lot for you help so far!

brucebartlett

Hi Lars,

I am trying to understand what you want to do from your last post. If you could post a hand marked up sketch it might help. One problem with sheet metal as it is and the moment you can not add flanges to riped edges, this may or may not be the problem. 

Here's a video I made of the way I created a sheet metal toolbox. You might find it helpfull.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQH-7sToETk

Bruce

lars_rengersen

Thanks! 
I indeed think it had to do with the corner relief.
After examining those to bottom parts closer they were not the same width due to the fact that I had already added flanges.
So I combined the newly adopted approach with the 'panel by panel' approach I used earlier.
First I created the bottom sheet and added the bends using the solid.


Then I added flanges and two tabs to create the desired box. And now indeed it is the foldout I was looking for.



Thank you very much for your support and help!