HOW TO USE INCREMENTAL BENDING WITH SOLIDWORKS SHEET METAL

Widely used across designing and engineering industries, SolidWorks 3D CAD Design is an efficient software with remarkable capabilities. People from these industries use SolidWorks 3D CAD Design for numerous operations, one of those being creating sheet metal part designs. This software is known to have helped them accelerate the design process, save time and increase productivity.

One thing that may seem complicated when creating sheet metal part designs is handling complex sheet metal bends. Contrary to the mass belief, it is rather simple. In this blog we will discuss about doing just that.

To practice this, import a part into SolidWorks. Using Convert To Sheet Metal, flatten the part. Here, you would need to tackle the two tabs first, the ones that are in the middle of the part, to break them into incremental sections.

Something that works the best in this case is the Split Face Tool. It projects a series of sketches onto those faces that you want to add more bends to. You can also use a trick wherein you add a bridge of material between two ears by flattening them together.

Then, all you would need to do is use the Convert To Sheet Metal option as well as Collect All Bends to get that part which has incremental bends. You will then be able to flatten the parts and witness all the bend lines. A quick trick: you can also suppress some of the bends and see how you can, in fact, step through the bends.

That is how you can use incremental bending with SolidWorks Sheet Metal. To learn more about SolidWorks Sheet Metal, we would suggest taking a professional SolidWorks SheetMetal Training.