Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.
First time visiting? Here are some places to start:- Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
- Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
- Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
- Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.
If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.
Tabs on Sheet Metal?
One of my co-workers asked me how to do something like this in sheet metal, and I just assumed that the sheet metal Tab feature would do this. It turns out it does not. It only adds material to the flat outline of a part of a sheet metal part. Partial flanges are great if you want the sides of that to be normal to the bend. In order to do this angled tab, I had to sketch the tab and add a bend. To avoid the worst bend relief I've ever seen, I had to create these by sketching and extrude/remove myself.
The results of this still don't get the tab in the exact right place. I can use move face, but that leaves weird artifacts.
There has to be a better way to do this. Do I need to create an improvement request, or am I missing something basic?
Simon Gatrall | Staff Mechanical Engineer | Carbon, Inc.
Comments
In other CAD systems I belive this is called a sketched flange?
I think this also includes the need to be able to join 2 sheet metal parts together joined at a bend or something? Would be handy for sure!
Bricscad has this
Let me know if you do an improvement request I'll up vote it.
@S1mon
I've just run into that same issue last week. I don't frequently do sheet metal, these days, but I was expecting some things from the days when I did my CAD things in Spaceclaim. They had (and possibly still have) a sheet metal environment they developed together with the well known sheet metal machine manufacturer Trumpf, and got quite some input from them. With Spaceclaim being a direct modeler in most parts, the approach was different, though. Anyway, tabs like these, and all types of flanges that would only occupy part of an edge, were a breeze to make, pattern and modify. Things like the relative position of tabs on an edge or the width of a tab could be defined by driving dimensions. Bend reliefs were always following the modifications made to a tab. It not actually being a feature, some kind of feature-like algorithm took care of that. Anyway, it was highly usable and had a ton of dedicated tools. All these were accessible in a tab/sheet metal stuido in the Spaceclaim GUI.
When making these relatively simple tabs in OS, recently, I expected someting similar to happen, but I was surprised that even creating simple tabs of a specified width, that didn't go all along an edge was a difficult thing to do, and it required a lot of partially contardicting steps to finally get what I wanted. Finally I had to draw the reliefs first, just in order to get a manageable sketch- or dimension-driven flange/tab width. Me manually making the reliefs is not how a sheet metal toolset is meant to work, though. That was pretty disappointing.
OS sheet metal makes it hard to design possible stuff (left) while it lets me do impossible stuff (right) without hesitation:
So, whenever you feel like creating an improvement request, let me know and I'll create 20 more onshape accounts just to vote for it! ;0)