From the course: Inventor: Sheet Metal Design

Creating sheet metal defaults in Inventor - Inventor Tutorial

From the course: Inventor: Sheet Metal Design

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating sheet metal defaults in Inventor

“

Sheet metal components are manufactured from stock materials. Sheet metal design tools need to know what material will be used and how it will normally be processed in order to build a quality component. Let's review how Autodesk Inventor understands that information and create a new sheet metal style so that you're familiar with the process. To access this information we got to the sheet metal defaults tool. Auto Desk Inventor will be able to show you what sheet metal defaults are already built in, let's review one of these. By selecting the edit icon it will bring up the tabs that are used to govern this information. We have three of them, the sheet tab governs what the material is, what the thickness is and how it will be represented in 2D flat. The bend tab shows us what other features might be created during the creation of a bend. The corner tab shows us how intersections of features will be resolved. To build a new style we'll just simply select New, give it a name. And start the process, by activating it first and then going through the tabs, for example we'll need to change our material to something appropriate. Set our thickness and of course Inventor can work in any units you like. Here I might say that I want my formed patterns to only be represented by a center mark so if we have a center punch it will only show a mark in the 2D representation. On the bend tab instead of a round relief because I'm working with aluminum I might allow it to just tear the material. And my standard bend radius instead of being twice the thickness of the material I might want it to be half of the thickness of the material. The corner tab shows me the settings that I like and I'll simply save my new style. One thing that's very important is to make sure that anyone creating sheet metal parts has access to these styles so that we all are making consistent parts. We can take any one of these styles and export them out to an HTML file that can be shared with other users. We can also import files created by other users by selecting the import tool in the lower left of this dialogue box. Once we're done creating sheet metal styles, we can see how these affect our components. For example, my part has now changed because the three millimeter sheet metal style has been made active. Once I've generated a component, if I change this active style, all of its features will be updated to reflect the various changes to radius and to sheet metal thickness. This is the real power of using sheet metal defaults.

Contents