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Custom Feature: Butcher Sheet Metal - A Low Effort Sheet Metal Splitting Feature
Derek_Van_Allen_BD
Member Posts: 860 PRO
You ever find yourself yourself working on sheet metal parts and get to the very end of a build, go to send your parts out for fabrication and only realize at the last minute that your flat patterns are too big to fit on the laser bed? Then have to hack and cut to pieces the final product with thin extrudes and wonder why the split feature doesn't work on sheet metal parts? Well that makes one of us, because that definitely never happens to me.
But in the continuing spirit of pushing the envelope of sheet metal modeling capabilities, and to maintain my reputation as a sheet metal alchemist I have taken it upon myself to implement a very crude version of a sheet metal splitting feature.
Butcher Sheet Metal: for those times when you just gotta chop your sheet metal parts in half.
Butcher Sheet Metal has 2 distinct modes of operation: Chainsaw and Scalpel. These are loosely analogous to the part split and face split modes of the vanilla splitting feature.
and by loosely analogous I mean architecturally and literally analogous
Chainsaw Mode will cut across everything belonging to a sheet metal master definition body all at once when you select a part to split, even if you only select one sheet metal "part" to be modified. Explaining how and why this behavioral mode works this way would require me to get some diagrams going for the anatomy of a sheet metal part but the explanation might get a bit wordy for this post. In loose terms, if you used a solid convert workflow that results in many pieces and choose this option, the splitting action will affect all the other bodies resultant from the original inputs. This mode has the option to selectively keep one or the other side of the split if that's a thing you're interested in doing for some reason.
Scalpel Mode will split with more precision, allowing you to target only individual pieces of your sheet metal subassembly that you wish to cut down to size. The resulting bodies from this operation will be created with rip associations to their neighbors to get nice consistent clearances between your parts out of the sheet metal rebuild engine that match the rest of your design intent. Additionally this mode includes some sketch selection options for splitting because that's how face splitting works in the normal split tool. Makes for the ability to add nice keying geometry for your splits for the floor guys to have an easier time lining up the separated panels when the parts need welded back together. At the expense of the press brake operator's day in the case seen above, but that's a problem for a different script to solve.
There are probably ramifications to using this script in conjunction with other sheet metal features that I have not foreseen and made no effort to test how it affects stuff downstream but you were never going to use this feature at the beginning of the tree anyway, were you? Now you can equip yourself with your chainsaw and scalpel and go forth and commit butchery.
Comments
This is why I love Onshape! I can't see exact times but seems less than a day later there's a really neat and powerful custom tool to target a niche use case.
Well done!
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD I always enjoy reading your posts, your writing always makes me chuckle. And good work on another FS!
I'll admit I was a little slower on the delivery than I could have been. Had a lot going on Friday at work. Next time I'll shoot for same hour delivery.
Derek Van Allen | Engineering Consultant | MeddlerVery nice! Thank you! We usually solve this by just ordering a bigger laser though, and then we use an actual chainsaw (with a standard scalpel‑blade chain) to cut the puzzle pattern.
But then people start designing parts too big for the bigger laser and then you get caught in this arms race situation with the drafting team. I've seen it happen too many times. Now I've got this 3d printer on the shop floor that you could drive a car into the build chamber.
Derek Van Allen | Engineering Consultant | Meddler