Solidworks Sheet Metal

1. What Sheet Metal Is & How It Can Be Used: Hello and welcome to this course on solid worksheet Nestle. Before we get started, we're just going to quickly talk about what she metal is and how you can use it. My name is John Allison and I'm a design engineer. I've been using solid works since 2006 and worked on all sorts of different product design and engineering projects. I've previously created a range of Solid Works courses that take people from having never used Solid Works before all the way up to being confident users. But there's courses didn't cover sheet metal. So I wanted to make this stand alone sheet metal cores. Sheet metal parts, as the name suggests, are made from flat sheets or metal using various techniques such as bending, cutting and forming. And these can be used to create all sorts of things from something extremely simple, like a basic bracket. So more complex items like this to more advanced things still like computer or electronics enclosures all the way up to very complex shaped things like aircraft, wings or car body work. In solid worksheet metal. We can create these metal parts in 3D and then we can virtually unfold them for cutting from a flat sheet. One thing I should say at this stage is that even though the module in Solid Works is called sheet metal, you can actually use it for other models than metal. For example, I previously used it to create cardboard packaging because it's very easy to create a 3D shape like a box and then unfold this inside SolidWorks. So if you think outside of the box a little bit, there are some other possibilities for the use of sheet metal. In this course, we will first introduce the basics of sheet metal. And we'll learn the various different techniques you can use, including building up sheet metal parts using a base flange, which is a flat sheet, and also converting solid parts to sheet metal. Towards the end of the course, we'll put everything together and we'll create a sheet metal enclosure so we can see how to create to the sheet metal drawings will also learn how to export these 2D files for manufacturing. So welcome to the course and let's get started. 2. How to Use This Course: Before we actually dive in and get started with the course, just got some very quick admin about the course itself, how to use it, and some things you might need to know. This course assumes that you have basic SolidWorks knowledge so that you know things like how to use the interface, the view controls, starting new files, parts, sketches, drawings, and so on. If you've never used Solid Works before, then you're probably better off taking a general intro to Solid Works course first. And there's many good ones available online. It may be possible for you to exactly copy these videos, but personally I wouldn't recommend that. But obviously it's up to you. In terms of using the videos, I would recommend that you watch in high-definition HD. So you can see everything very clearly. You can pause the video any point or slow them down using the controls in the bottom. If you do get stuck, then please drop me a message using the Q and A's below. And I will try and get back to you soon as possible. It might also be worth checking through the questions or having a quick Google search to see if anyone else has had the same problem already. With the questions I get on here, probably about 80 or 90% of them have already been answered if you searched through the questions. Another thing that might sound very obvious and maybe even a little patronizing is if you get an error message, then just take the time to read it before clicking OK. And know that personally sometimes I can just click okay without reading it. But actually in SolidWorks, the error messages can be very helpful and descriptive and often they'll tell you exactly what the problem is. So finally, before we start this course uses SolidWorks 2019. If you're using a different version and you can still follow along, the interface might look slightly different and some mine features might be slightly different. But in general, the principle should be very similar. And as I said, if you get stuck, you can always send me a question. For each section. And video exercise files are provided. You don't actually need these. These are just an example of how I made it. So if you get stuck or you want to have a closer look at the files, then you can just open these. Solidworks isn't backwards compatible. So this means if you have an older version than 2019, so 20181716, so on, then you won't be able to open these example files, but they are just for reference rarely then not strictly needed. So you can complete the course without them. So with all that out the way, Welcome to the course, and let's get started learning about sheet metal. 3. Creating a Base Flange: In this video, we're going to cover the very basics of starting your sheet metal parts. So open up Solid Works. And when it's open star new parts, The first thing that we're going to do is make sure that you've got the sheet metal toolbar open. Go up to the command manager at the top of the screen, and right-click somewhere in this empty space here. And then from the menu that pops up, let's select sheet metal, which is this one here. We then get this sheet metal toolbar that has all of the sheet metal tools on it. And we can either leave this floating or we can drag it to one side and dock it to the side. So I'm going to dock it down at the bottom here. So all of these tools will remain available. We can also add a sheet metal tab to the command manager. And we can do this just by right-clicking on any of these names of the existing tabs. And then from the menu that pops up, let's select sheet metal. Now we have this new sheet metal tab here. And this has got all of the same tools as that toolbar down at the bottom. But it can be helpful just to have tools in two places. And these icons at the top I just a little bit bigger and a bit clearer for you to see in these videos. Now that were set up, we're going to start actually making our sheet metal part. There are a number of ways to make sheet metal parts, and probably the simplest, but also the most flexible, is by creating a base flange. So we'll look at this version first. Put simply a base flange is just the first feature of a sheet metal part. You can then add things to this like bends and carrots and so on to build up the part. And in that way, it's very similar to a normal Solid Works part. To start the base lunch first, we need to sketch the size of the flange. So let's start a sketch on the top plane just by selecting it here on the left and pressing sketch. Then select the centered rectangle. And let's draw a rectangle with a sensor point at the origin. Then let's add some dimensions, so make it 200 wide and 100 millimeters high. During this course, I will be working in millimeters. You can see down here M MGS stands for millimeters Graham seconds. You can also work in inches if you prefer. When you create sketches in SolidWorks is very important to try to always fully define your sketches. You can see this sketch is fully defined because all of the lines are black. And down here it says fully defined. We also can't move this rectangle around or change the size. If any of your lines are still blue, it means that your sketches undefined. So try just grabbing the centerpoint of that sensor rectangle and dragging it to the origin to fix it there. When you're fully defined, you can then exit the sketch by clicking up here on the top rights. To add the base flange, let's select the sheet metal tab from the command manager. Then select based flange slash tab is the first tool here. You can also select it down here on that sheet metal toolbar is the exact same tool. Then here on the left, we will get this message and we need to either draw a sketch or select an existing sketch. So let's select that sketch that we just drew by left clicking on it in the graphics area, you should get a yellow preview, something like this. We've got a load of options here on the left with different sheet metal parameters. And we'll go through these in more detail as we go through the course. But for now, let's just set the thickness here to one millimeter. Then set the bend allowance to K factor 0.05. and then the auto relate to rectangular also 0.5. once you've got all of those details that just press OK by clicking this green tech at the top. Now the base flange has been created, and we can see here on the left we've got this base flange, one feature. You can edit this just like any other feature by left clicking on it and pressing edit feature. You might also notice that we now have this sheet metal folder at the start of your design tray. And this contains all of the global parameters for your sheet metal par. And we'll cover this in more detail in future videos. Then down here at the bottom of the design tree, we also have this flat pattern folder. This contains a flattened version of your part. At the moment, we've just got a single flat part anyway. So this isn't very useful, but we will go into this in more detail in some future videos. And then finally up here we have this cutlass folder. This is essentially the same as the solid bodies folder. If you're just doing a solid modelling part, if you expand this, it will contain all of the different sheets within your part. So if we have two separate sheets within this part, maybe something like an enclosure with a base and a lead. Then we would have two separate sheets under this list. And we'd have a two in brackets here instead of a one. So as I mentioned, we'll cover all of these items in more detail as we go through the course. But so quickly recap this video. A base flange is one of the best ways of starting your sheet metal part. It's essentially the first feature of your sheet metal part. And you can create it just by drawing a closed profile sketch and then selecting base flange from the sheet metal tab or toolbar. That will also automatically add these sheet metal specific features into your model. So the sheet metal folder, the flat pattern folder, and the cutlass folder. At this point you can save your part, let's call it something like base flange example. And then we will pick this up in the next video. 4. Sheet Metal Properties - Thickness and Bend Radius: Welcome back to the sheet metal courts. This is how we left the part in the previous video. We've just got this rectangular base flange. In this video, we're going to have a look at some of the properties of your sheet metal part and how you can adjust these. We're going to go over a little bit of theory. We don't wanna go too detailed into that at the moment, but a little bit of introduction now will be helpful later on in the course. There's quite a bit, so go over here and some of it will make much more sense once we actually start to add the features later on. So don't worry too much if you don't fully understand everything at this stage. To edit the sheet metal properties of your bar, click on the sheet metal folder. We should be the first feature in the design tray. And then press Edit Feature. And you'll get these options on the left. As we previously mentioned, sheet metal parts are generally made from a single sheet that's all the same thickness. So here we can set one of the most important properties of the sheet metal part, which is the thickness. So for example, if I change the thickness here to two millimeters and then press OK. Now we can see that the base flange is two millimetres thick. And we can actually measure that using the measure tool. You can see two millimeters over there. These thickness settings are global throughout your entire par. So if I now add an edge flange, you don't need to do this on your own model is just for demonstration. We can now see that this edge flange is also two millimeters thick. Let's edit that sheet metal folder again. So click on it and press edit feature. And we'll have a look at some other options. So as we mentioned, the thickness is one of the most important options, but another very important one is the bend radius. This is the size of the curve that will be made inside of any of the bends that we add. So if I make the bend radius here 1.5 millimeters and then press OK. We can now see that the radius on the inside of this band is 1.5 millimeters. Hopefully you can see that whenever we bend a flat sheet, we're always going to have a slight radius there. So a slightly curved bend in the corner there. We're never going to have a completely perpendicular or completely square corner. And this radius will depend on the thickness and material and the type of material. But how do we know what this radius should be? Let's edit that sheet metal folder again. So click on the feature and press edit feature. And we'll have a look at some different options. The first option for the bend radius and probably the best one is just to speak to your manufacturer. Say to them something like I'm making apart in one millimeter thick steel. What bend radius D recommend. And they should be able to give you that information. You can also search online for this. If you search something like one millimeter thick steel bend radius, then that should give you a good idea of the number. Finally, you can also use the gauge tables in SolidWorks. The gauge tables have got a load of preset metal thicknesses and bending details that go along with them. To use the gauge tables, just click this box at the top that says use gauge tables. And then from the options, let's just try something like a sample table for steel. To use these gauge tables, you do have to have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer because Solid Works grabs that information from an Excel file. So if your Solid Works hangs up at this point and doesn't open these gauge tables, then just try installing Microsoft Excel. But assuming that your gauge tables work correctly. Now let's have a look at this stale air bending table. And bending just refers to the type of bends that we're making. So now down here, we've got a load of different gauge options. And you can see each one has a different number. The gauge number is a way of measuring the thickness of sheets of metal and it's used particularly in America. If you look at a gauge measuring tool like this, you can see that the number corresponds to the thickness of the metal sheet. And a higher number means a thinner sheet. Say for example, three gauge here, you can see is about six millimeters. If we choose 18 gauge, down here is only 1.2 millimeters thick. But we can see as we change the gauge up here, we should also see that the bend radius changes automatically. So this can give you a good idea of the correct sort of radius. We can see as the metal gets thicker, the bend radius also increases. And that's because it's much harder to make a really tight bend on a thick sheet. If you can imagine you've got a really thin sheet of aluminum foil. You can bend it really tightly, looks almost square. If you've got a really thick plate of steel, then you're going to need a much bigger bend radius. Now the problem with using the gauge is that the number can mean a different actual thickness depending on which material you are using. If you look at these examples, you can see 16 gauge actually isn't the same thickness for different types of metal. And that's because it's based on the weights of the sheet. So this can potentially cause confusion and it's not really recommended to use the gauge number by international standards organizations is much better to actually specify the thickness in millimeters or inches. So for our example, let's turn off the gauge table and go for something one millimeter thick and a one millimeter bend radius. And then you can save your part. So to quickly recap what we covered in this video, the thickness and the bend radius can both be set by editing the sheet metal folder here in the design tree. And these settings are global, so they apply to your whole sheet metal parts. The thickness of the material can be set either by specifying it with a width or by using a gage table. And as we just mentioned, I'd highly recommend using the actual thickness because as we just saw, the gauge can actually be different thicknesses with different materials. You'll also always need to set a bend radius. You can find this out from your manufacturer, or you can search online. Or you can use the preset values from the gage tables. In the next video, we'll have a look over the bend allowance and the auto relief. 5. Sheet Metal Properties - Bend Allowance and Autorelief: In the previous video, we started to have a look at the sheet metal parameters, the thickness and the bend radius. In this video, we're very briefly going to look at the bend allowance. All of this stuff we're doing now is a bit dry and boring. But once this is out of the way, we can start adding some actual features. So what is the bend allowance and why do we need it? In a nutshell, the bend allowance allows us to accurately calculate how big the sheet metal will obey when all of the bends are unfolded. If you think about it, when the metal is bent, the total size of a is a, which is the length of the base flange, plus B, which is the length of the edge flange, plus the size of the actual bend itself. And that is the bend allowance. But depending on how we measure this, we might get different values at the end. If we measure the inside here, then we'll get a different value to measuring along the outside here. Solid Works has got loads of different options to choose for the bend allowance. And if you're not really sure what you're doing here, then I'd recommend you just stay with this one, the k factor. If we look at a cross-section of a band like this, whenever you bend apart, there's always gonna be some material inside that gets compressed on the inside of the band. And then on the outside of the band, there's gonna be some material that gets stretched. At some point. There'll be an area where the compression and the stretching exactly cancel each other out and there's no change in size. The K factor is an imaginary line through a cross-section of your band where there's no stretching and no compression. So if we measure along that line, then it should give us the exact size of the unfolded parts that we need. The k factor is a ratio, so it's always between 010 is the very inside of U-bend and one is the very outside. So 0.5 is halfway through the cross-section. So if you're not sure which of these to use, I'd recommend a stain with a k factor and using 0.05. and that should get you pretty close to where you need to be. You can also ask your manufacturer for a value and they should be able to give you a number to put in there. And the good thing is that you can very easily change this at any point in your model and it will be applied throughout the whole model. There's some other options here. The bend allowance allows you to actually define the length of that bend region. But because you can put in any value, if you put in something wrong, then you could end up with results that are total garbage. The bend deduction is sort of similar. It measures the outside size of the part and then it removes a value from that. So if you're not using 90-degree bends, then this can get quite complicated. You can also use a Ben table or bend calculation. But if you're not really sure what you're doing here, then just stick with the k factor and leave it at 0.5. Now to finish off the video will just have a quick look at auto relief. Auto relief as a way of automatically adding relief cuts when the needed ON bent. So if I just exit the sheet metal feature and quickly adjust this edge flange to make it a bit thinner. Press OK, now we've got these automatic cuts on the side of the bend. These curves are the relief cuts. And if we look from the top, you can see we've got one on each side. These aren't needed for every type of bend. But hopefully you can see why they're needed in this case to allow that bend to be formed properly. These cuts here are just the basic standard rectangular cut. And the width of the cut here is related to the thickness of the sheet. If we use the measure tool and measure the width of the curve, you can see it's half a millimeter. And then if we measure the sheet is one millimeter. So if I now go back and edit that sheet metal folder, we can see on the auto relief we've got rectangular. So that's why it was a rectangular cut. And then for the ratio we've got 0.5. so that means because our sheet was one millimeter thick, then the width of the author Leif cut will be half of that, which was half a millimeter. There's also a few different options here. 4b round is quite similar to rectangular, but it just gives you this rounded inside edge. And then the other one is called tear. This basically tears the metal and it's the minimum that you need to do to be able to flatten the part in SolidWorks. So I'd recommend just sticking with rectangular or brown because they're the least likely to give you any issues when bending. So to quickly recap this video, we looked at some more of the sheet metal properties that apply throughout the whole model. The first was the bend allowance, and this allows us to work out the size of the flat part when all of the bends are flatten, there's a load of different options. And if you're not really sure which one to use, then just go with the k factor and either put in a number that your manufacturer gives you, just stick with 0.5. we should get you pretty close. And then finally the bend relief down here, just that small cuts when these are needed for your bands, you can choose different types of cuts. You can set the size using the ratio here. In the next video, we'll have a short look at some of the other base flange options. 6. Other Base Flange Options and Flattening: A couple of videos ago, we learned how to create a base flange, which is the first feature of your sheet metal part. In this video, we're going to look at some other options for creating that base flange. When we created that first base flange, we used what's called a single closed sketch. So if we edit that baseline feature and edit the sketch underneath, we can see we've just got that single rectangle. This just gave us a single flat sheet. This is called single close because it's just a single profile is only one of them and it's fully closed, so there's no gaps around the outside. So this type is called single closed. We can also create a base flange using a different site called the single open contour. So if I just exit this sketch and then delete that edge flange that we added. And then edit the base flange sketch. And we've got this rectangle underneath here. I'm going to select that and delete it. So now instead of using a single closed profile, we can now try a single open profile. So for example, I'm just going to get the line tool and just draw a straight line all the way across from the origin. I am just going to set the distance. And then when we exit the sketch, we can see we've created a base flange just from that single line. If you edit the baseline feature, you can also change the width here. And as before, we can still access all of those sheet metal parameters that we had before. And we've still got the flat pattern folder at the bottom here. Instead of just a single line, we can actually also make the sketch more complex. Let's edit the sketch underneath that base feature and then get the line tool again. And let's just add a few more lines, maybe a vertical one going up here, and then the horizontal one over here. And I'm just going to add some more dimensions again. So maybe 30 here and 30 here. So now we have this jog shape. And now when we exit the sketch, we can see that those lines have created a new shape of base flange. So this is sort of similar to using a thin feature extrude. In general, solid modelling. If you look at the edges of the base branch here, they're actually curved even though the underlying sketch was completely perpendicular and had those straight corners. That's because the bend radius is automatically apply to the sharp corners. And the size of that bend is the bend radius that we specified in the sheet metal folder here. Now that we've got some bends in the model, it's possible to actually flatten this. This wasn't possible with the previous base flange because it was just a single flat sheet. But it is with this one because we've got these two bends in the model. To flatten the power. Or we have to do is go to the sheet metal tab and then select flatten, which is this one here. You can also select it on the toolbar. Wherever your toolbar is, it's exactly the same tool. So click on flatten, and now the part is completely flattened. We've got these dotted lines that show the bend locations. And if you can't see those, you can also just go to the View menu, then hide, show, and just make sure that your sketches are turned on. You should also now see that the flat pattern feature, which is the very last feature of the sheet metal part, has now been on suppressed. So pressing that flattened button essentially just an suppresses that flat pass and feature. And so fall apart up again. We can either just press the flattened button again or we can click this icon in the top right corner. And now you can see that the flatband feature is suppressed again. So it's basically turned off in the model. When you're creating base flanges using these single open sketches, you don't have to just use straight lines. So if I edit this sketch again, you can also use something like an arc or a spline. I'm just going to draw an arc appear something like this. And then I'm gonna make it tangent to the straight line here. And then when you exit the sketch, you can see we've got that nice curving top section. And you can also flatten this and MUGA completely flat Patton as normal. So this type of base flange covers what's called the single open sketch. We've already covered what's called the single closed sketch, which is any single close shaped like a rectangle or a circle. So that would be something like this. Just a single closed rectangle. But there's actually a third option as well. This is called multiple contained closed. You don't need to remember all of these names, but basically this one is just a closed sketch with other closed sketches within. So to show an example, I'm going to edit this rectangle again. And we could have some other closed profiles within it. So for example, these could be things like screw holes or maybe cutouts for your paths. And then when you exit the sketch, you can see those holes and cut outs are directly in the base flange. Personally, if I was making something like this, I would probably keep this base flange as just a very simple rectangle. And then I would add these holes and cut outs later on. Just because it gives you a little bit more flexibility if you want to turn off features or just them later on. But I just wanted to show that you do have this option and you can save a step there and save some time if you want to. So to recap, base flanges are usually the first feature in your sheet metal part. And they can be made in three main ways. So you can have a single closed sketch, which is a closed shape, something like a rectangle or a circle. You can have a single open sketch and that's something like a collection of open lines or arcs, splines and so on. And then finally, you can have a multiple contained close. That's what we just looked at. So it's a closed shape with smaller closed shapes within it. So you have a few different options there to start your part. In the next video, we're just going to take a quick look at some different sheet metal materials. And then after that we'll finally start adding some new features to our base flange. 7. Materials Selection: So far, we've learned how to create a base flange in order to start your sheet metal part. And we've looked at the sheet metal properties, things like the bend radii and the K factor. Now before we actually start getting into how to add features to that base flange were quickly just gonna look at two common materials, steel and aluminium. And then have a brief look at three slightly less common ones. So you can see which might be best for your different jobs and different paths. This isn't an exhaustive list. There's many other materials out there, but these are the most common ones. Are probably the two most common are aluminum and steel. And these are both got a number of different advantages and disadvantages. Let's take a look at steel first. This is probably the most common sheet metal material. Steels are great all-round material. If you're not really sure what to use, then steel is usually a good bet. The main advantages of stale and it's very strong. So it's often used for things like car body work, but aluminium is becoming more popular there. Steel is also quite ductile. That means it's easy to bend and form into shapes, and it's also quite cheap compared to other metals. This really depends on the world market, but it can be up to three times cheaper than aluminium by weight. And then finally, steel is a little bit easier to weld than aluminium. Some of the downsides of state law that is quite heavy. This does depend on the exact grade of material that you use. But in general, steel can be about 2.5 times more dense than aluminium. If you've got two sheets with the same thickness and size, then steel will be much heavier than aluminium. Another downside is that it doesn't really have great corrosion protection. I'm sure you've all seen rusty steel items may be things like old cars and things like that. But basically this rust is a reaction between the metal, the oxygen, and water. And this eats away at the metal, so eventually weakens it and eventually completely destroys it. You can counter this with surface treatments, things like galvanizing. You might have heard of galvanized steel or even by painting. But other metals like aluminum are much better at naturally resisting corrosion. The next major metal is aluminium, and this is used a lot, is used for things like drinks, cans, bike frames, and some cars. And it's also used a lot in aerospace components. And that's because compared to steel, it's very light, as we just mentioned earlier. And also it doesn't rust. Aluminum is very malleable so it can be bent and formed for easily. I'm sure you've all seen aluminum foil and just how flexible that is. But the downsides of this, as we just talked about with the steel Are there. It can be much more expensive than steel. Is also nowhere near as strong as steel. So if you've got two parts for the same job. Then the aluminium one would have to be quite a bit thicker than the steel one to have the same strength. But on the plus side, as we just mentioned, it is actually lighter. So it depends on the exact type of metal, but it generally aluminium does have a greater strength to weight ratio than steel. Those are the two main metals you're likely to say. There's also some other fairly common ones. One of those would be copper. This has good electrical and thermal conductivity. So you often see it for electrical parts, things like wiring or battery contacts. It's also got good corrosion resistance, but it's still quite malleable. So it's often used for things like plumbing fixtures, pipes, and so on. It is quite expensive though. So some countries have a problem with thieves stealing copper wiring from things like telegraph poles or electricity substations. And that's because you can sell it for a very high price to a scrap yard. Similar to copper is brass. This is basically an alloy of copper and zinc. So a mixture of copper and zinc is pretty similar to copper really, but it's got this bright look to it. So it's often used for decorative things. You'll sometimes see a four door locks, hinges, utensils, trinkets, and things like that. It's similar to copper in that is very malleable. So it's good for making musical instruments. You might have heard of part of the orchestra which has the trumpets and so on, called the brass section. And it's good for these instruments because it can be folded a lot and worked pretty easily. And it's also similar to copper that is very resistant to corrosion. So you'll often see it for things like handles on old chips. And then finally another metal is stainless steel. This is basically steal. Let's alloyed with other metals, chromium or things like that. And they stops or slows down the corrosion process. So if you want the benefits of steel, but you don't want your parts to go rusty, then this can be a really good option. Often you'll see it in things like cutlery. So knives and forks, things like surgical equipment. In terms of sheet metal, you might see large items like kitchen equipment, sinks, kitchen counters, cabinet doors and so on. But the downside with stainless steel, because with materials, Everything is always a trade off, is that it's much more expensive than standard steel. Obviously, there's dozens of other options, even things like tin, nickel, titanium, even gold. But these are all fairly minor use compared to those first five. Within those main materials, there's also many different grades and subtypes. So it's probably best to speak to your manufacturer and see what works best for your own needs and for your budget. As we touched on in an earlier video, these sheets of metal are often sold by the gauge, which is the thickness. So higher number means a thinner sheet and the gauge depends exactly on the material. So 16 gauge steel, as we said before, is a different thickness to 16 gauge aluminium. And then both of them are different to 16 gauge zinc and so on. Just to repeat one last time, I'd recommend not using the gauge and actually specifying the thickness in millimeters or inches. That is to avoid any confusion. As well as the thickness of your metal, you might also need to consider the sheet size. There's a number of standard sizes. These can be metric or inches depending on where you live. Some of the common ones are shown here. It might be worth checking this sheet size first, if you've got a very large part of, you've got many small parts that you might want to nest onto a single sheet in the most effective way. So this covers metals Valley briefly. To quickly summarize, steel and aluminum are the two most common. Steel is strong, cheap, easy to work with, but on the downside, it's pretty heavy and it can go rusty. On the other hand, aluminium is expensive, but it's light and it's got a good strength to weight ratio and it's very easy to form. There's a few less common ones like copper and brass. They're very good at conducting heat and electricity, good at resisting corrosion, and they're very malleable, but on the downside there are expensive. And then finally stainless steel. It's got a lot of the benefits of steel, but it's also expensive. The metal thickness can be specified using the gauge number, but I'd recommend you actually specify the thickness and then just double-check your actual sheet size. There's a number of different standard sizes around the world. So there's a very brief introduction to materials. In the next video, we're going to start looking at actually adding new features to our base flange. 8. Using Edge Flanges: Welcome back to the sheet metal course. After a bit of theory in the previous section, we're now going to start looking at adding some actual features. Open your existing base flange part. And it should look something like this. If you've got any extra phalanges or any extra features on there, just delete those. And then we'll edit this baseband part. And we'll make sure that we're all starting from the same page. All we want is a sensor rectangle fixed to the origin. So delete any other smaller profiles within there. And then set the size as 200 millimeters wide and 100 millimeters high. Just so we're all on the same page here. Then when that's done, exit that sketch. And we should just have a single rectangular base plans like this. Next, let's edit the sheet metal folder and just double-check that we've got a thickness of one millimeter and a bend radius of one millimeter. And then you can exit editing that feature. Bends edges called edge flanges are one of the most basic and common features in sheet metal. If we wanted to make this base flange into a box, then we'd have to add some extra bends at walls called edge flanges. And these edge phalanges really are the workhorse of sheet metal. You'll use them all the time to add the edge flange. Select the Edge flange feature from the sheet metal Toolbar, which is this one. And as usual in SolidWorks will get loads of options here on the left. You don't necessarily have to use all of these. So don't worry if it looks a bit daunting. The most important ones are just the angle, the flange length, and also the edge where you want to add that blanch. The first thing that we need to do is choose this edge. Makes sure you in this edge selection box at the top. So make sure it's blue. And then just zoom in on your model and select one of the edges. I'm going to select the short edge here. You should get a yellow preview and you can't really see much at the moment on my video. But as we zoom out and move the mouse around, we can see that the preview follows the mouse. I'm just going to drag the preview up like this and then left-click ones. Now we've set the rough size of our age flange and we can move over to the left and set the parameters a bit more specifically, up here at the top we have the bend radius. This is the radius of the inside of this bent. And this is the global value that we set in the earlier videos when we edited that sheet metal folder. This will be the same for every band in your model, but you can actually override it for specific bends. If you uncheck this use default radius box, then you can change the bend radius here. And you should say, as I change the size here, we can actually see the bend radius changing in the preview. We'll just stick with the default for now. So I'm going to put another check in the box and it goes back to one millimeter. The next thing to set is the angle of the bend, which is down here. As we change the value here. You should be able to say they actually changes the angle of the edge flange in the graphics area. And if I move the model around from the side, you can see it's a bit more obvious there. I'm going to put that back to 90 degrees. And then the next important parameter is the flange length, which is down here. As we change the value here, we can see that the Preview Changes in the graphics area. You can also flip the direction of the flange by clicking this reverse direction button here. There's also some different options for the end condition of the flange will stay with blind. And that just means that the length of this flange is whatever value we put here. Now one thing about the flange length is where do we measure it from? Depending on how you measure it, you'll get a different length. We have three options here, and hopefully you can see them sort of explained on the little icon. The first one is called the outer virtual sharp. And as you can see from the icon, this measures from the sharp corner where the outer face would be. If we go to a side view and zoom in a bit, we can see this a bit more obviously, this measures from the outer face of your base flange to the top of your edge flange. The second option is called inner virtual shop. You don't have to remember these names. You can just look at the icon. This one measures from the sharp corner of the interface. And if you look at the preview, you can see as I switch between these two options, the length of the flange and the top there actually changes. So this one is measured from the inside face to the top of the edge flange. The third and final option is called the tangent bend. And this measures from the outside of the bend. In this case is the same as the first option because our bends at 90 degrees. But if you've got a different angle, then it will give you a different result. Often I just leave this on the first option unless you specifically want another one. But it doesn't really matter if you use the first or the second one, as long as your consistent and you've got the length that you want on the flange there. Another parameter that might be important is where is the flange actually positioned? Do we want the material inside or outside the base flange? If you look at these icons, then you can see which of the options suits you best. And this really depends on what you're trying to make. Usually one of the first three options will be used. If we zoom in, we can have a closer look at how these work. So the first option here puts the flange material inside the base finds footprint. The second one puts the flange material outside of the footprint of the base flange. But actually you can see because of the bend shape, some of the bend area is still within the base flange. So the third option, Ben, outside, means the entire band is added onto the base fungicides. And these final two options are only really used in specific circumstances. So I'd recommend sticking with one of the first three unless you want to use the others for a very specific reason. Then down here we've just got a few more options that we'll cover in more detail later in the course. We can set up custom bend allowance or customer leaf type. For now, let's just set a 90-degree bend, make it 50 millimeters long with the first option there, how to virtual sharp. And let's stick with the first option here for the flange position. Then press OK. Now our first feature, the edge flange, is created and we can see the edge flange here in the design tree. In the next video, we'll look at these edge flanges in a little bit more detail. But for now, just to recap this, I'm going to delete the edge flange feature and it's quickly show you that again. To use the edge flange, or you have to do is select the Edge phalange feature and then choose the edge where you want to add the flange. Then you can set the angle and the flange length, which are the two most important options. And you can choose the flange position and a load of smaller serve options if needed. And it's as simple as that. As we mentioned in the next video, we'll look at the edge flanges in more detail. So for now you can save your part and I'll see you there. 9. More Advanced Edge Flanges: Welcome back to the sheet metal course. In the previous video, we looked at adding basic edge flanges. And in this one we're going to look at them in more detail. They really are one of the workhorses of sheet metal and you'll use them all the time. We're going to look at adding multiple edges, changing the width of your flanges and a few more of those sub options open apart. And this was how we left it. We had this single base flange that was 200 by 100. And then we had this 90 degree edge flange that was 50 millimeters high. So here in the design tree we've got the single base flange and the single edge flange. And if we drag the robot bar up, we can see the edge flange is taken out of the model. So we've just got the base flange there. Then if we drag back down, the edge flange is added again. The first thing we're going to look at is when you add your edge flanges, you don't have to add them one at a time. You can actually add multiple flanges using the same feature. Let's delete this edge flange. You could also just edit it by selecting the feature and pressing edit feature. But I'm going to delete it so we can show you the whole process from the beginning. Then select the Edge flange tool again. Let's select that short edge again. Drag out the preview and that set the same size as before. So 90 degree angle and 50 millimeter flange length. Don't press okay yet though. If we want to add more edges, firstly, make sure you're in the edge selection box at the top here. And then just select the other edges that you want, such as this long edge here. And then this one here. Press OK. And now those flanges are added. So we've got the makings of a box here. Now to edit that edge flange, or we have to do is select it in the design tray and press edit feature. The first thing that we're going to have a look at as changing the angle here. So if we increase the angle and I try something like a 120 degrees, you can see in these corners the flanges have automatically been trimmed away so they don't clash with each other. If we press OK to add those flanges, you can see that a bit more clearly now. And if I flattened apart by pressing flatten here on the toolbar and we look from the top, you can see it's actually quite a strange shape there. The corners aren't 90 degrees and that's to stop them clashing with each other when the parts folded up. Now I'm going to edit the feature again. And this time I'm going to change the angle downs and 90 degrees and then just continue reducing it further. And you can see as the bend moves outwards, we get an increasing gap here. So that trimming of the edges only occurs when the bends are moving towards each other, not when they're moving apart like this. Now let's set the angle back to 90 degrees and have a look at another option. Because we now have multiple flanges. This option, the gap size has become available. This is the gap between the adjacent flanges. If we change this, if you watch in the graphics area here, as we increase the gap size, can see the gap actually increases here in the corners. So it's actually trimming away the side of the flange there. You'll also see that if we only have one flange, so if I delete these two extra flanges. Then that gap option gets grayed out because we can't have a gap if we've just got one single flange. If we add a second flange again, now we've got that option again. The gap option will also be grayed out if the angle is less than 90 degrees. Because these two flanges are moving apart, we can't have a constant gap there using this option. But there is another way we can do that and we'll look at that later in the course. I'm going to set the angle back to 90 and the gap back down to one millimeter. Now we've covered all of these options here at the top, there are just a few more down here. The custom bend allowance and the custom relief type just override those settings that we set in the sheet metal folder. And to be honest, it's very rare that you have to change these. Usually you can just stick with the settings that cover your entire model. Then above those here we've got two more options. The first one is offset. This just allows you to offset the bend away from the edge of that you've selected. So we can offset like this and we've got some different end conditions here. And if we offset with multiple edges, this gap in the corner is automatically filled in. I'm just going to edit that again and remove the offset. And the final option that we're looking at in edge flanges is this trim side bends option here. This is a fairly specific options. There were run through it quite quickly. If I delete all of the edge flanges and then just add one small one on the end here. I'm going to make it 90 degrees and 50 millimeters long, like we had before. And we want the material inside the band, which is this one. And I'm not going to select the trim side bends option. So that's a very basic standard edge flange. The trim side bends option will be used on the next flange. Just to demonstrate what it does, I'm going to select the Edge flange option again, going to add it to this long edge here and make it the same parameters as the first one. So 90 degrees, 50 millimeters. So we haven't selected the trim side bends option on either of these flanges. I'm going to press OK to add that flange. And if we look in this corner here, the bend of this first flange kind of overlaps in this corner. This isn't really ideal, could potentially cause a manufacturing issue. The good thing is we can use this trim side bends option to automatically trim away this area and hopefully get rid of any problems. First we need to edit that edge flange feature. And then let's just go down and select trim side bends. Just put a check in the box and then press OK. And now you can see we've just trimmed away that little section that was overlapping in the corner there. The actual trim itself is automatic, so you can either have it or not have it. There's no adjustment of parameters needed in that. If I press control zed now, so we can go back to the other state. You can see the difference there. So watching this area here, I'm going to press undo now. And we can see we've now got the overlapping problem area. This covers pretty much all of the options within the edge flange tool. But one last thing we're going to look at, if you look at the length of our edge phalanges at the moment, they automatically run the entire length of the edge that we've selected, and they're very square on the sides. This isn't a very flexible approach because we might just want them to just run a short section of that age to edit them. It's pretty easy really. All we have to do is edit the edge flange feature. So if we want to edit this long flange here. Just edit that feature in the feature tree. And then here at the top, just click this Edit flange profile box. Firstly, you'll get this message that says the sketch is valid. That just means that the sketch can be used to make this edge flange. We can move that message out of the way. And then we can adjust the underlying sketch to just the flange. It can be easiest to do this from a normal to you view. So I'm going to select that and then we can edit the underlying sketch and change the flange. So for example, we can drag the sides in like this. And the message here is still says that the sketch is valid. So that means we can use it to make this edge flange as well as the length. You can also just the height. And then as is good practice, we can add some dimensions. And when we're done, we can press finish. And you can see the edge flange has now been adjusted. It doesn't run the entire length of that edge. You might also notice that we've automatically got the little bend relief cuts at the sides. And that's because the material is inside the band. If you don't see those, it's probably just either that you've selected a slightly different type of bend or your bend relief options are little bit different to mine. And as usual, we can flatten the part if we need to, and then we can fold it back up. There is actually a slightly quicker way to edit these flange profiles. All you need to do is expand the edge flange feature. And then there should be a sketch under that feature. If you've got multiple edge flanges, then you'll have multiple sketches. Then you can just edit the sketch of the flange that you want to change. This gives exactly the same result as the process that we just went through. This weighs just a little bit quicker. So we can now change the size of this flange and then just exit the sketch. And you can see that's pulled through to the flange that we can also edit the actual profile of the flange. And to do this, let's edit that sketch again. And then we can adjust this profile so we could add some holes in there. Or we could remove this vertical relation and maybe angle one of the edges like this, add in some more dimensions. And then when we're done, we can exit the sketch. And you can see the edge of that flange is no longer completely vertical. It follows the sketch that we just drew. So that covers edge flanges in quite a lot of detail. They're very common in sheet metal in SolidWorks, probably the most common feature that you'll use. To recap this video. I'm just going to edit one of the edge flanges like this one. We can select multiple edges by clicking on this box at the top and then choosing the edges. If you have adjacent edge phalanges, we can adjust the gap here. If we change the angle so the flanges moved towards each other than the edges will automatically be cut to maintain that gap. We move them outwards, they won't be automatically extended. We can also use the trim side bends option to trim away the bottom corner where two edge phalanges meat. And then finally we can adjust the edge flange profile itself, clicking this edit flange profile box. Or we can just directly adjust the sketches which are underneath the edge vanish feature. If you have multiple flanges in the same feature, then you'll have a sketch that corresponds to each of those flanges. In the next video, we'll start looking at some more advanced sheet metal features. And the next one, we'll cover tabs and holes. So see you there. 10. Adding Material Using Tabs: Welcome back to the solid work sheet metal course. Up until now, we've covered the basics of sheet metal. We've covered base flanges and edge flanges, which are these extra edges here. Now we're going to start looking at adding new features to add more detail to your models. Firstly, let's open that base flange model that we were previously working with. And then just delete any additional flanges that you have. So we should just end up with one single base flange, 200 millimeters by 100 millimeters in size and one millimeter thick. So if we now wanted to change the size or the shape of these baselines and wanted to add an extra tabs sticking out. There's a few different ways we could do this. Firstly, we could just start a sketch on this top face or on the appropriate plane and just draw out the geometry. We want. Maybe something like a rectangular tab like this. So I am going to get the rectangle tool and make a corner rectangle and just start from this top corner. I'm going to go down to the midpoint of the existing base flange and then just add some dimensions. So I'm gonna make it 50 millimeters wide. Now to add this extra section to the base flange, we could just go to the Features tab and then select extruded boss base. And you'll probably get a preview, something like this. And we can see straight away, this isn't what we want. This section is way too thick. And also if we zoom in, is actually going in the wrong direction. So we'd have to set the correct thickness, in this case one millimeter, and also flip the direction like this. We could also choose an end condition like up to surface and then link that thickness of the new section to this existing base flange thickness. Then if you press OK, we've now added that section to the existing base vent. And we've got this Boss Extrude feature in the design tree. So this extra section is essentially just a part of the base funds now. And we can add features to it like an edge flange, for example. But there's actually a bit of an easier way to extend your base plans than this. I'm going to delete that boss flange that we just made, but I'm gonna keep the sketch that we had underneath it. And now we can use that sketch to make this new tab. All we have to do is go to the sheet metal town on the command manager. And then here where it says base flange, you might notice it also says base flange slash tab. So all you need to do is click that button because we already have a base flanging the model. This feature now doubles up and you can use it to add tabs. So make sure that you've got that sketch selected in the design tree. And then just click that base flange slash tab button and then press OK. And now that new tab is added. To demonstrate this again, start a sketch either on the top of your existing base flange or on an appropriate plain. And then draw out the geometry you want. So in this case I'm gonna use another rectangle. Then I'm going to add some dimensions, let's say 50 by 30. And then you can even use this feature from within the sketch. Just go to the sheet metal tab. Press base flange slash tab and then press OK. And now that new tab is added. And in the design tree there is actually specified as a tab rather than a base flange because we already have that first feature as the base flange. Now you might have noticed during this video that I've been using the mouse gestures. These are a series of shortcut menus that you can use to speed up your workflow. And I'll show you how to turn those on there. Before we actually look at how to turn them on. And I'm going to edit that tab sketch again. And the mouse gestures are actually context-specific. So that means that they're different in sketches, parts, assemblies, and drawings. To use the mouse gestures. Just hold down the right mouse button and then move the mouse slightly in any direction. And you should get this circular menu with all of these different command options. So for example, here's the circle tool for that tool, rectangle, tool trim, tool line till the convert entities, the Smart Dimension there at the top and then Exit Sketch in the top right. So for example, to use the circle tool, all I do is hold down the right mouse button and then swipe my mouse to the right. And that will select the circle tool like this. To get to the Smart Dimension tool. Just hold down the right mouse button and then swipe up. So this is a really good way to speed up your work. To turn on the mouse gestures if you don't have them switched on, just go to the Tools menu and go all the way down to the bottom and click on Customize than up here, select the mouse gestures, tap. Now we can see a guide for all of the different mouse gestures. And this is what I was saying when I mentioned that the mouse gestures are context-specific. So you see in a sketch we get these options. In a part, we get these view options and then assembly. We get these Anna drawing, we get these. And you can actually customize these as well if you want to turn them on, or you have to do is click enable Mouse Gestures here. And then you can choose how many gestures you want to use. I usually go with eight. That maybe you can just go with four if you're just getting used to them initially, then when you're happy, just press OK to close those options. So obviously you don't have to use these mouse gestures. I recommend it just as way of speeding up your work a little bit. Now I can exit out sketch and we've got those two extra taps. And as we said before, these are basically part of the base flange now. So you can add extra features to those, like the edge flange and so on. You can also do things like mirroring these tabs. So I could select the front plane and then select one of those tabs. And then I can select the mirror features option from the Features tab. And then press OK. And now that tab is mirrored over. So if you give your part, it's a little bit of thought before you start actually making them. Often you can just make half of your part or a section of your part and then mirroring or pattern it to save time. To recap this video, you can add extra tabs to your base flange just by sketching the profile. And then you can either use the extruded bas based option or a bit of a faster way to do it is to go to the sheet metal tab and use the base flange slash tab option. This means that your new tabs will always be linked to the thickness of your metal sheets. You can also use standard features like mirroring and patterning to help build your model. In the next video, we'll have a look at the opposite of adding tabs, which is taken away material. But for now, you can just save your part. 11. Cuts and Holes: Hello and welcome back to the sheet metal course. In this video, we're going to look at cutting away material from your model. And there's many reasons why you might do this. Maybe you need holds for screws or cut out for cables or for something else to go through. Or it might even be cosmetic. You might wanna cut a logo out or something like that. It's very easy to cut away parts from a model in sheet metal. But as usual with solid works, there's a few different ways we could do it. The simplest one is just to start a sketch on the face or playing where you want to make the cut. So for example, let's just go here on the base flange. I'm going to start a new sketch and then go Normal to. And then I'm just going to draw the profile that I want to cut out. I'm going to use the mouse gestures and get a circle tool. And then I'm just going to draw a few circles. I'm not going to dimension them or fix them in place just for a bit of speed. And to make the curve is just a case of going to the sheet metal tab and then choosing extruded cut, which is this one. This is very similar to just a normal extruded cut in SolidWorks. But because we're in sheet metal, We've got a few extra options here. The first one is called linked to thickness. This means that your current will always go all the way through your sheet thickness no matter how thick it is. Let's choose that one. You can also do a normal curve, and we'll talk about this more in just a moment. But for now, let's press OK. And those cuts are created to demonstrate that normal cut feature. I'm just going to add an edge flange and I'm gonna change the angle so it's not at 90 degrees, something like this. Let's go for a 55 degrees. And then I'm going to make a cut on the top face here that goes through this edge flange and also the base flange. You don't have to follow along with this part is just for demonstration. So I'm going to get a sense a rectangle. And I'm gonna make a cut like this. So I'm gonna go to my sheet metal tab and then select extruded cut. And then firstly, I'm gonna turn on linked to thickness and I'm gonna turn off normal cup and then press OK. And this is what we come up with. We've only cut through that initial thickness of the face where we started this sketch. So we've only cut through this section here. If we want to cut through that edge flange as well, we could edit that code extrude feature, and then we could choose an end condition like through or both. So this will go through everything in your model in both directions. We still haven't got the normal two feature to end on. But if we make this cut and we look from the top here, you can see it looks absolutely fine from the top. If we now flatten this part and we zoom in on that curve and we spin it around so we can see underneath. We can see now I've got this angle on the cup because when the part was folded up, we had that angled edge flange. So the angle of this cut will be 55 degrees, which was the angle of the edge flange when it was folded. But something like this would be really hard to cut with a laser cutter or a water jet machine or something like that. So ideally, we want this current to be normal to the top face of the sheet. That means that we want it to be perpendicular. So we want 90 degrees here instead of that 55. And we can do this using that normal to option. Let's unflattering apart. And then edit that cut extrude feature. And then this time I'm going to put a check in the box that says normal caps. And now you should be able to see that this edge here has been cut at 90 degrees to that surface of the edge flange. And now if we flatten the part, you can see we've got a nice perpendicular cut through there. And we've got the same in this corner. So this would be much easier to actually cut out of a flat sheet of metal. As well as cutting a specific profile. You can also use this option is called simple halt. Just click on the feature and then select a face or planes at the home and choose where you want to place the whole. So I'm gonna choose this top face. Then you can adjust the diameter of the hole here on the left. We've also got that linked to thickness option as well. So we can put in any value here. And then when we press OK. That's simple, hole is cut out. I personally don't think that this tool is very useful because now we actually have to go in and edit the sketch underneath the hole. And we have to fully define where the hole is by using smart dimensions or by linking it to an existing feature or point. So this is a bit of a convoluted or drawn out workflow rarely. I personally think it's better if you just draw a circle using a normal sketch and then use the extruded corruption. However, a better option for making holes in this is to just use the whole wizard. If you're not familiar with the whole wizard, it's a really powerful and useful tool and it's got loads of preset sizes of holes and types of holes can save you a lot of time. And it also makes it much easier to edit your holes if you need to modify anything later on. The whole wizard can be found on the Features tab. And in sheet metal it works exactly the same way as it works for a normal part. Select the hole was at 0 first you will have the type tap here. You can choose the type of hole we want. As you said, there's loads of different options. For example, let's go with unsymmetric and just choose something like a standard hall going to go for a screw clearance. And then we can choose whether we want a normal hall or a loophole. Then we can click on the position SAP. And now everywhere that we place a point, a hole will be added. So this is a really efficient way to add multiple holes at once. The great thing about using the hole was it is that it's really easy to then edit all these features. So all you have to do is go to the whole feature in the design DRE and press edit feature. Say if I want it to change these open screw holes to threaded holes, we could just choose that here on the type tab. And then those changes will be applied to all of those holes in that feature. Just one thing to know about thready tolls. Sometimes the thread doesn't actually show up. It really depends on your exact view settings. So if you need the actual threads to be visible there in your model, you might need to go into your view settings and just make sure that those cosmetic threads are visible. So even if you're doing very simple holes, I would personally recommend that you use the whole wizard. One final thing to be aware of width cuts is that some manufacturers have limits on how close any cut out or whole can be to the edge of the sheet, or B to any bends. This might be ten millimeters, but it really depends on your manufacturer. So if you've got any holes that are close to an Azure or bend, then maybe speak to your manufacturer and check that they can actually make your model. So to recap, cuts and holes, you can make cutouts in your sheet metal part just by starting a sketch and sketching the profile that you once occur. And then go into the extruded cut option on the sheet metal tab. You can then link that to the thickness of the sheet. And you can also do a normal curve, which means the curve will always be perpendicular or at 90 degrees to the surface that is on. This can make it much easier to make cutouts from a flat sheet before anything is folded or vents. If you making holes, you can use the simple Hall option. But personally I would recommend using the whole wizard or just actually drawing a circle and then doing an extruded cats. In the next video, we're going to look at a brand new feature, which is the miter flange. But for now, you can just save your parts. 12. Miter Flange: Hello and welcome back to the Solid Works sheet metal course. We're now starting to look at more advanced sheet metal features, and this one will cover myself. Flanges. Now might've flanges are a tool that are quite easy to misunderstand. But basically it's a tool that allows you to draw a series of flanges on one or more edges. So anyway, it's pretty similar to just a basic edge flange. But a big advantage is that you can actually sketch the flange profile. So you can make more complex flanges without adding load of different features. The best way to explain this is probably to give an example. Let's open that current base flange part and then just delete all of the extra features except for the base flange. So let's delete everything that was added in the previous video. So we should just have the base flange that's 200 by 100 millimeters. To atomize a flange, first we need to sketch a profile, and this needs to be perpendicular to the edge of the flange. So for example, if we want the flange to be long here, we need to sketch on this end face here. Let's try that. Now. Let's zoom in, select that face and star sketch. Then we can go to a normal to view. If you don't have this little View menu open, you can just press the space bar to open it. Then let's zoom in a little bit and just start drawing our flange profile. This can either be straight lines or arcs. So let's start with a straight line. Just gonna get the line tool and then go directly upwards from that top corner by about 20 millimeters. So you should have a sketch like this on this face. I'm just gonna get the Smart Dimension tool and add a 20 millimeter dimension there. So looking at it in 3D, you should have a sketch on the small end face going directly, vertically upwards, that's 20 millimeters long. Now we can use this to create the miter flange. So let's go to the sheet metal tab. And this is the might've flange option is the next one after the edge flange. Select that option. And because we're still in the sketch, we've automatically got this preview and we've used that line that we've drawn to make a miter flange along this edge here. And you can see even though we drew a straight line, the bend is automatically added down here. We can also change the flange position by clicking these options here on the left. And no matter which one we select, you've always got that bend added in the corner there. Now if we wanted to add extra edges, we can just select the edges like this, as long as they're adjacent to the initial edge. And we can go all the way around like this if we want. If I delete those edges and then just add the first one back again. And then if I try to add, say this one on the left hand side, we can't add this because it is not adjacent to that original h. So the edges always need to be connected to each other. So you create a line of edge phalanges like this. So in this respect you can think of it a little bit like a swept boss base just in a normal Solid Works part. So the straight line here is acting as the profile sketch. And then the edges here are essentially acting as the path sketch. So they always have to be connected to each other. And then you can press OK to add those new flanges. So why would we bother using this feature instead of just using something like a normal edge bunch? Well, there's a few different benefits. The first one is quite simple. Let's edit that might've been sketch by expanding the miter flange feature and then editing the sketch underneath it. And let's delete the vertical relation on that line. So you can either select the line and then click on this little icon and press delete. Or you can select the line and then select the vertical relation here on the left and press delete. It's exactly the same thing. So now this line isn't defined vertically and we can move it around like this. So let's set a new angle, something like a 120 degrees from the horizontal. Now if we exit the sketch and we take a look at the flanges, you can see in the corners, we've actually maintain that correct gap all the way round. You might remember that when we use the edge flange with these walls angle outwards, then we've got an increasing gap payer. To show you what I mean. I'm just going to drag back above the miter flange and then add some similar flanges but using the edge flange feature. So I'm going to click edge flange. And then we're going to add some flanges Using the same size. So I'm going to make it 60 degrees, 20 millimeters long and going to select these three edges. And then if we press OK. We can see here in the corn is we've got this increasing gap. If we suppress this feature and then drag back below the might've flange feature. You can see the gap is actually maintained all the way up. So this is a really useful little feature. So now in the corner there we've got that proper miter joint. And this is actually where miter comes from. It's a term in woodworking when you join two pieces of wood together at an angle. So that's a nice little extra feature is quite useful. But the main use for miter flanges is that we can actually draw a more complex profile for an edge. It doesn't just have to be a single line or an arc. Let's edit MIT flange sketch again to demonstrate this. So expand the might've flange feature and then edit the sketch underneath. Then if we go Normal to and zoom in on the sketch, and this is what we've got at the moment, just that single straight line angled at a 120 degrees. But we can actually add a lot more detail to this. So it could get the line tool and add something like this. Just going to add some dimensions as I go. I'm gonna make all of these ten millimeters. And then once done, going to exit the sketch. And now you should see we've got really quite a complex flange that goes all the way round and it's cited correctly in those corners. So the corners are joining at the correct angle. You'll also notice that even though our sketch had sharp edges, so if we look at the underlying sketch here, we've got the sharp corners, the Ben's have actually automatically being added. We can also flatten this part by pressing the flattened button. And you can see how this part would be folded up into a flat sheet. So hopefully you can see the value of this tool, especially if you're working with a bit more of a complex flange shape, it might take a little bit longer to draw that initial sketch. But imagine how many separate edge phalanges we would've needed to create this shape. And then we still wouldn't have had this correct corner gap. So to recap, the might've flange tool allows you to create these complex flanges using just a single sketch. Firstly, you'll have to draw that flange profile. And this sketch has to be on a face that's perpendicular to the edge where you want the flange. Then you can select the sketch and then select the might've flange tool, which is here on the sheet metal toolbar. And then just select the edges where you want the flange. Remember the edges have to be adjacent to each other. We can use simple profiles, so just something like a single line and that will help you have the correct miter or corner gap there. Or you can use really quite complex sketch like we have here. One thing to note with the mice, a flange is that even though you can make quite complex edge like this in solid works, it might be hard to actually physically make all of these bends without the bending tools clashing on different edges. So you should always try and think about things from a manufacturing point of view. In the next video we're going to look at hems, which are a way of folding the sheet over on itself to improve the edges of your design. 13. Hem: Hello and welcome back to the sheet metal course. In the last video, we looked at might've languages like this. And in this short video we're going to look at him feature. A ham is when an edge is folded over on itself. And this is a term that actually comes from fabric making and textiles. If you look at the edge of a t-shirt or genes or many items of clothing, then you'll usually see that the fabrics folded over on itself to avoid a ragged edge. And this is called a ham. In sheet metal. It's the same idea rarely. This is what a typical ham actually looks like, although there's a number of different types. You can use this for removing sharp edges from your model or hiding imperfections. And you can also use it to reinforce an edge because you're doubling up the thickness of the material that hems are pretty easy to add in solid worksheet metal. So let's open up our part and we've still got all these mice have flange details. Let's delete those and also any extra edge vanishes. So you should just have that base fungi again, that's 100 by 200 millimeters. The only thing that we need to do is select the hand feature, which is up here on the sheet metal tap. And as usual, we've got a load of different options on the left. Firstly, we need to select the Edge where we want to actually add the hand. So let's select this shorter edge along here. And you should get some kind of preview like this. Then we can set the exact hemp parameters here on the left. Firstly, you can set whether the material of the ham is inside or outside the base flange. If we look from the side, you can see this first option. The ham is entirely inside the base. Or with this option, material outside, the ham is added onto the base. Then under the type of him, we've got four different options. And hopefully these little icons are fairly self-explanatory. The first one is called closed. This is just where the edge is completely folded over on itself. You can set how long the Folders section is just by adjusting this value here. And with a closed option, if we zoom right m, we do still have a very small gap here because we've got a tiny bend radius here. The second one is called open, and this is fairly similar to close, but as well as the length, we can also set the gap distance here. So we could actually make this something like two millimeters. And in this way we can specify that gap that now the ten millimeters for the ham actually includes the outside of the bend as well. So remember we've set that to ten millimeters. I'm gonna press ok to make that feature and then get the Measure tool. If we measure this straight section here, then it's actually only eight millimeters long. If we measure the outside of the bend here as well, that's two millimeters, so that gives us a total of ten. So in total, we've got two millimeters for the band plus eight for the straight section given ten overall. If we double-click on the feature, we can also actually edit the gap directly instead of going all the way back into that edit menu. So if I change that gap down to one and then rebuild. Now you should be able to see that the straight section is actually slightly longer because the band here is smaller. But overall the total is still ten millimeters. Let's go and edit the hymn feature again. And then look at the third option. That's this one is called teardrop. And with this one, you can actually set the angle of the band and the inner radius of the bend. Let's try just in the bend radius first. So if I put this to two, you can see it makes that whole curve larger. Then you can set the angle here. And you see as I change the angle, that gap at the bottom here remains the same. So we don't actually need to set a length there. Then finally we have rolled, which is similar to teardrop, but we have a completely circular edge here with no straight section. So instead of that teardrop shape that came down to meet the rest of the sheet. We actually just stop at the end of the circular section here. And you can set that using the angle here on the left. You can also add multiple edges to any of these hem Options and you'll automatically get a corner relief cuts out like this. And you can actually change the miter gap if that option is available down here. So to quickly recap, hems are basically when the edge of the sheet is bent over on itself. And this might be to make it stronger, to make it look better. Or just the take any sharp edges off. Hems can be added by clicking the ham button, which is here, and then selecting the edges where you want the hymns. Then you can adjust your parameters. There's multiple different options. And if you look at a little diagrams on the icon, they'll explain exactly what each of the parameters changes. In the next video, we're going to look at jokes, which are basically an offset zed shaped bend. So save your part and I'll catch you then. 14. Basic Jogs: The next thing we're going to look at is the jog feature. A jog is very simply just a combination of two edge lunges. So the sheet material gets offset and it makes a rough zed shape or z, if you speaking American. So it looks kinda like this. This can be used to stiffen the edge of apart or to make the edge slightly smaller. So maybe if you're trying to make an LED that fits inside a base, or if you're trying to join two pieces together with a flat outer face. In this video, we'll take a look over how you actually use the tool. And then in the next video, we'll show a more practical, useful example. Opened the part that we've been working with. And as usual, just delete all of the features apart from the base flange. So I'm going to delete this hem feature. So we've just got the base flange that is 100 by 200 millimeters. The jog feature can be found on the sheet metal tab here as an a jog always starts with a sketch. So if we click on the jog feature without a sketch, we get this message here on the left. We can either choose an existing sketch or select a new face or plane to draw the sketch on. Let's select this upper face of the base flange to draw a new sketch. So if you left-click on that, now we're drawing a sketch on that flange. And you can tell this because we've got this Exit Sketch icon in the top right corner. I am going to go to a normal to view. Remember you can press the space bar to open this View menu. So now we're looking directly down on the top of the base flange. Then select the Line tool and we're just going to draw a standard line. Now in the base flange from the top edge vertically down, all the way down to the bottom edge, something like this. And then I'm going to use the Smart Dimension tool. And I'm gonna set the distance from the edge as something like 20 millimeters. So now this line is going to set the position of the bend of the jog. And if we exit this sketch, we'll go straight into the jog feature. Now we've got some options on the left. The actual jog feature hasn't been created yet. And so we set some of these options. The first thing we need to do is select the fixed face. This is the face that won't move when the drug is added. So make sure you are in this box at the top on the left. And then select this large left-hand area. And you should see that some kind of preview appears. If we look at the jog from the side, we can see that rough kind of zed shape that I mentioned. And if we look more closely, we can see those two offset edge flanges that I mentioned earlier. So we've got the first one here, and then immediately afterwards we've got the second one here. And if we go to side view here, we can see that even though we've got that extra material in the bend here, we haven't lost any length at the end. So in this case, the jog feature actually adds material in that bend area. As usual, there's many options here on the left, we can change the direction of the joke here, whether it's going up or down, just by pressing this button. We can change the gap here. And we can change how the gap is actually measured using these three buttons. The small pictures on the icons show you exactly what's being measured there. So this first one is from the top of the base, vanish to the outside of the jug. The second one is from the top of the base flange to the inside of the jog. And you should see that the jog moved up a little bit higher there. And then the third option is the overall size of the jug. So it's from the bottom of the base flange to the top of the jock. So you can choose whichever one you want. It's really up to you. And I'm just gonna stick with the first one for now. If we don't want to add any extra material to the band, you can actually own. Check this fixed projected length bucks. So now you should see we've got a little gap at the end now. That's because the extra material has actually been used up in the bend. And as we switch between the different gap options here, you should see that the length of that extra part of the job changes because the length of the bend changes. So you can fix the length or not. It's really up to you depending specifically on what you're trying to create. We also can set the job position here. And again, the icons tell you exactly what's happening. So on this first one we have the bend center line on that sketch that he drew. This one has the material inside the sketch and we can see it changed slightly in the preview. This one has the material outside the sketch, and then this one has the entire band outside the sketch. So that was a pretty standard options throughout sheet metal. So as usual, whichever one you want to use depends exactly on what you're trying to achieve. And then finally, we can adjust the angle here. We've got 290 degree bends at the moment, one here and one here. But we can easily change this, for example, to 60. And now I've got to 60 degree bends here. And if we press OK. That jog feature is created underneath the jog feature in the Feature Tree. We've got the sketch where the jog started, and then we've got the two actual job bends. So this covers the actual theory of the feature. And to quickly recap, jog is a fairly simple feature to use or you need to do is draw a sketch where you want the job to be. Then select the jog tool. Then you just need to set the fixed face, the type of job you want, the exact position, and then the angle and also the gap offsets. In the next video, we'll take a look at how you can use this in a bit more of a practical setting. 15. Jogs - A Practical Example: In the previous video, we introduced the jog feature and we looked at how you can use this in theory. But in this video, we're going to have a look at a more practical application. It might be a little bit easier to understand. Open up that base flange par and just delete any extra jog features or anything. Just so we've got this single base flange again. You don't have to follow along with this demonstration is really up to you to show you how we could use this. Firstly, I'm going to add some extra bands. So I am going to get the edge flange. And I'm going to add flanges on both of these short edges, gonna go 90 degrees out and say 50 millimeters on both sides. Then I'm going to add two more edge flanges to the top of those edge phalanges. So we want the flanges to come in towards the middle. We want them to almost touch. This number might change depending on your exact Ben settings. But for me, 100 millimeters gets them touching exactly in the middle. We don't quite want them to touch because otherwise we won't be able to flatten the part. So I'm gonna put it down to 99 millimeters. So now we've just got a small gap in the middle there. So let's imagine we're trying to make some kind of open-ended box, but we want these two top faces to be joined together somehow. Otherwise, this whole thing might be a bit weak and those taut faces or probably flap around a little bit, just not be very strong. So in theory, we could just extend both these edges. So we've got a really small gap there. They'd be like half a millimeter or something and then weld them together. But actually we've got a very small phase. There is only one millimeter thick, so be very hard to weld those accurately. So if we use the jog feature, we can actually make these edges overlap each other and we can get a lot more space there that we can either spot well together or maybe even add some screws or rivets or something like that. To do this, let's add a jog. This time I'm going to draw the sketch first. So I'm going to start a sketch on this top face. Go to a top-down view. And then I'm gonna get the line tool and just draw a line all the way down from the top edge to the bottom edge. And I'm going to set it as 20 millimeters from the edge like this. So this is how it looks in three-day. We've just got that line all the way along parallel with the edge. Then we just need to select the joke feature. We can do this from within the sketch. So go to the sheet metal tab and just select the jog feature. Now we need to select the fixed face. So let's select that left-hand area again. And you see we get that preview. Now if we go to a side view, we can see what's happening a bit more clearly. From this side, I'm going to flip the jog direction. So the jog is actually inside the box. So I'm going to click this reverse direction box, and now the jug is inside. Then for the actual jog direction, we don't want the parts to exactly touch. We just want a small gap, maybe half a millimeter. So let's write in 0.5. millimeters there. And then I'm going to set the angle to 90 degrees because that's probably what will come up as default. And then for the actual dimension position, I'm going to choose this inside option. So this gap inside should be half a millimeter now. But actually if we look at our preview, we know that the sheet is one millimeter thick. So looking at this gap, there's no way it can be half a millimeter. It looks to be maybe 2.5 or even three millimeters. So something's not right with our job here. And the reason for this is because we have a bend radius of one millimeter sat. So we've got a one millimeter Ben here, and then we've got another one millimeter band here. So the minimum distance for these 290 degree one millimeter bends is actually larger than that half millimeter that we sat. So the only way we can reduce this gap further is to change the jog angle. If we go over here on the left and adjust the angle, you can see that gap is now decreasing because the angle of the bend is changing. If we keep reducing the angle down, we can see at some point, even though the angles going down, the gap isn't getting any smaller. So the gap must now be half a millimeter. And that looks about right, if you look at the sheet thickness that. So now let's edit again and let's set the jog angle at 60 degrees, which should give us that half millimeter gap there. And if that all looks good, we can press OK to add that joke feature. So now we have this offset jog area. We can actually extend the other side of the sheet to cover this over. So we have an overlap. Let's start a sketch on this top face. You could also zoom in and select this small face and use convert entities and then just do a simple extrude. But let's actually start from that large top face and then we can use a tap. So I'm gonna go to a normal to view and then I'm going to use a corner rectangle. I'm going to start from the top corner edge here on the right. And I'm going to go down and is finished here, which is the bottom of the band on the jog section. And if we look in 3D, you can see that a bit more clearly. It's not going to actually touch the other half, but it's going to be pretty close. And now we can just add a tab. So this is a good example of when you might use the tab feature. So we can go to the sheet metal toolbar and just press base flange slash tab and then press OK. And now we've added that extra section. So now we can see we've still got that flush outer surface on the top of the box, and now we've got a fairly large overlapping area. And as we said, we could use this to spot, weld or puts on screws through or rivets. So to recap again, the jog feature adds two bands to make an offset section of sheet. And you might use this to reinforce an edge without adding too much thickness. Or maybe make an overlap in section like this here. To make the jog feature first you need a single line in a sketch. Then you can use the jog feature and select a fixed face, the face that won't move. And then you can adjust the parameters, things like the jog offset, direction, position, and the angle. Remember if you have a very small offset with the job, then you may need to play around with the angles to get that correct offset. In the next video, we're going to look at sketched bends, which are kind of similar to jogs, but they just use a single bend. So there are actually a bit simpler. 16. Sketched Bend: Welcome back to the solid work sheet metal course. In this video, we're going to look at sketched Ben's. Now these are bands that are made in a very similar way to the joke feature, but they only give us one single band instead of those two offset bends that we get with the job. They're quite simple to use and they're quite similar to the jog feature in that firstly, we just need a single sketch line for the bank. So let's open our file that we'll be working with. And as usual, we can delete all of the features apart from the base flange. So we should just have a single base flange like this. Then let's start a sketch on this top face by clicking on it and pressing sketch. And then go to a normal to view like there. So we're looking down straight on the base flange from the top. Then next we can get the line tool. And let's just draw a vertical line all the way down from the top edge of the base flange down to the bottom. Then we can set the dimension, I'm gonna say as 40. So it should look something like this. Now, from within the sketch, we can choose sketched bend. It's this one here just below the jog. And here on the left we get some options that are pretty similar to the job really. The first thing we need to do is choose the fixed phase. So this is the face that won't be Ben, won't move. In this case, let's choose this left-hand section. And then we can see on the Preview, basically a band is just our aid where of that sketch buying is drawn. As usual, we've got all of the different ben position options. Here we've got bend outside material, outside material inside and Ben center line. Then here we can change the direction and the angle. And then we can change the bend radius and the bend allowance if we need to. If you press OK, that sketch band is just added. Then here in the design tree, we've got the actual sketch bend feature. And then underneath we've got the sketch itself, that's got the line in it, and then we've got the bend itself. You can also select the feature before you have a sketch drawn. And it will prompt you to draw a new sketch. So we could draw something like this. I'm going to draw from the top and add an angled line, something like this. Then we can choose the fixed face, that large section in the middle again and press OK. And now this angled bend is added. And this band here is a good example of why we might use this sketch bend option. It's much easier to create this sort of angled band. If we wanted to make this using just an edge flange, then we'd probably have to cut away that corner first and then add an edge bunch. So it's just an extra operation that you don't really need. Another advantage of using Sketch bands is that we can always know the exact size of the initial flat sheet. So if I drag back before that band, then we know that this base flange is always 100 by 200, no matter what kind of bandwidth per onto it. If we started with this base flange and then added edge phalanges two at, depending exactly on where the bends we're positioned, we might get a slightly different overall sites. In general, you don't really have to think about this issue because it only really comes into play if you've got a non-standard bend allowance and slightly non-standard bands. And then usually it's only a very small difference, but it's just something to consider and be aware of. If the accuracy of your final part is very important, then maybe consider sketching our flat piece and then adding sketched bands instead of using edge flanges. So to recap, a sketch bend is as simple as it sounds. It's just a band along a sketch line. You can either sketch the line first and then select the feature. Or you can select the feature and then draw a sketch as part of the feature. Then you can select the fixed phase and the bend details. In the next video, we're going to look at cross breaks. It will be quite a short video because these are very specialist feature. 17. Crossbreak: Hello, welcome back to the course. In this video, we're going to look at cross breaks. These are quite specialized feature and quite simple in SolidWorks. So just be a short video. But basically across break is a slight bend that's added to a flat sheet to give it more strength and make it more rigid. Often this is in the form of two overlapping bands that make an x shaped by this. And this just makes the path slightly stronger. So you can use lighter, thinner, cheaper material. And you've probably seen it on things like ventilation ducts to out across break in SolidWorks is very easy. Let's just open apart and delete all of the features apart from the base flange. Then you can just click cross break and select the face where we want to add the break. And you'll see that these two yellow preview lines appear, and these represent the bend in the cross break. Now one thing to note about the cross brake feature is that it doesn't actually change the geometry of the model at all. So it doesn't make any bends or any changes to the physical model. So if I press OK to add this, the only thing that's added, these two lines on the surface. These represent the cross-product, but they don't actually bend anything in the model. They're just here for the 2D drawing. So we can see where the cross break should be added when physically making the part in real life. If we now edit the cross break, we can adjust the radius and the break angle and also the direction. But you'll see as we change these, nothing changes in the preview. This doesn't actually change in the model. It will only show up on the bend notes in the 2D drawing. To demonstrate this a bit more clearly, I'm gonna make a very quick drawing from this part. You don't have to follow along with this part. So I'm going to go to file, make drawing from part, just gonna select a standard sheet Size. And then I'm just going to drag in that flat pattern. And you see here we've got these lines that indicate where the cross break is. And we've got this bend note that indicates the direction, the angle, and also the radius. So if we change those options in the cross brake feature in the model, it will change the bend note here. Now if I go back to the part, one final thing to show you. One of the most common types of cross break is this x j. But we can actually edit these lines if we need to. And we can make a custom shape. To do this, edit the cross brake feature. And then click here where it says edit cross profile. When you do this, you'll get this popup that says the sketch is valid, can move that window app the way. So now we can adjust the sketch if we want. You might need to delete some of the relations in order to drag the lines around. But you could do something like this. You see it says the sketch is still valid. One thing to note is that the ends of these lines always have to touch the outer edges of the face. If I move this point, then you see we get a different message up here. It says one of the endpoints of the crossbreed sketches, not on the faces edges. So all you have to do is drag it back to that edge. And then it should say that the profile sketches valid again. And then you can click Finish to show you again. If one of the endpoints isn't on the edge, then you won't be able to click Finish here. So it weren't really let you make a mistake with that here. So that's cross breaks, quite a simple feature. To quickly recap. Cross breaks are used to make apart more rigid. And in Solid Works they are added just by clicking Cross break and then selecting the face and then adjusting the parameters. You can also change the profile of the break if you need to. In SolidWorks, adding across brake doesn't actually change the geometry of your model. So it makes no changes to the 3D model. Just gives you a visual representation of where that cross break will be added during the manufacturing. In the next video, we're going to look at swept flanges, which are sort of similar to a miter flange. 18. Swept Flange: Hello, welcome back to the course. We've now learned quite a few of the sheet metal tools. And the next one we're going to check out is called the swept flange. This feature, as the name might suggest, allows you to sweep a flange along a path. So it's quite similar to a swept boss base or swept cut in normal modelling. So also fairly similar to a miter flange, but I'll show you a difference later on in the video. This is quite a specialist tool, so we're just going to look at quite briefly. So as you probably know, to create a swept whitespace or swept cut, you need two elements. You need a profile, and then you need to practice sweep that profile along. Open up your previous part. And if you've still got that cross brake feature that you can just delete those or any other features. So we've just got the base flange again. The first thing that we need to create a swept flange is a profile sketch. This is essentially the flange profile. So I'm going to zoom in. We're gonna start sketch on this small phase here. And then I'm gonna go Normal to, then I'm gonna get the line tool and I'm going to draw the flange profile. It doesn't matter if you've got sharp corners. These will be rounded off automatically. I'm gonna add some smart dimensions. Let's just say 3020. And then we can exit the sketch. And if you look at it in 3D, it looks like this. This is just gonna be the profile for our new flange. Now if this was a normal sweep, we'd also need some kind of path sketch to suite that alone. But in this case we can actually just use the edges directly. So all we need to do is go up to the sweat flange on the sheet metal tab. Then in this first box, let's choose that flange profile that we just drew. And then in the second box here, we can choose the edges where we want that flange. And we can go all the way around like this. And the first thing that you might notice is that in the corner there, we've got that nice curve corner now. And if we add this fourth edge, we can actually have a fully closed profile all the way round. We've got all of the usual options here on the left, the flange position, the bend allowance, things like that. And if you're happy with how that looks, we can press OK to add that feature. We can actually flatten this part. And here we can see all the band lines. If we try to bend this with a traditional bending process, then it probably wouldn't really work. You'd have to use something like stamping. So the difference between this and the might've flange is it doesn't miter the corners, so it doesn't add any bend relief in the corner that it just goes all the way round with that circular band. So if I now suppress this sweat flange, but then I use the same profile sketch to make a miter flange and then select the same edges like this. You can see we've now got a fairly similar shape, but the corners are very different. We've got these cuts in the corner here. This is especially obvious if we flatten it. We've got these cutouts in the corner that might need to be welded up. But this part might actually be easier to bend depending on what kind of bending process you're using. So depending on what you want your end product to do, and probably more importantly, how you're gonna make it. You can use these two different options, the sweat flange and the might've flange to produce a similar result, but with this important difference of the mightiest corners there. So to recap, a sweat flange allows you to sweep a flange profile along one or more H0 is similar to a swept across space. To use it first you have to create a profile sketch, which will be for the flange. This can be lines and arcs. And then you can use this sketch along with the edges to create the sweat flange feature. This feature doesn't add Ben relief in the corners. So in that respect it's different to the might've flange at which does that depend really, but both of them are useful in their own right. In the next video, we're going to look at the fold and unfold features, which are sort of related to the flattened feature, but with some very important differences. 19. Unfold and Fold: Hello, welcome back to the sheet metal cores. The next feature that we're going to look at is the fold and unfold feature. This allows you to fold and unfold bends as the name suggests. But before we actually get into it, let's open up our model and delete any previous features. So maybe a sweat flange, maybe it might've flange just so we just have this base flange feature again like this. Then let's add an edge to each of these four corners. So firstly, I'm going to select those corners by holding down Control and left clicking on them. And then I'm gonna select edge flange. And let's make them say 50 millimeters upwards and 90 degrees. And it doesn't really matter which flange position that you use. This should give us quite basic box that looks like this. Now the fold and unfold features just allow us to fold and unfold these Ben's. They can be found up here. To use it first, let's try unfold. So click on unfold and then select a fixed phase. So this is the face that doesn't move. Let's select the lodge base flange face in the middle. Then select the bends to unfold. You have to select the actual bend itself. You see I can't select the flange here, can just select the bend. And we can see here on the left it says edge bend one. Then if we press OK, that bend is just unfolded. If we edit the unfold feature again, you can also click this button collects all bends that will automatically select all of the bends in the model. And then when you press OK, all of those will be unfolded at once. Now in this unfolded state, we can use this to make any changes across the flat model. And this is particularly useful if you're trying to make cuts across bands or things like that. So for example, I'm going to start a sketch on this top face. I'm gonna get the circle tool and draw a circle, something like this. Do an extremely Kurt and link it to the thickness, so it goes all the way through. So now when we fold the edges backup again, these cuts will be transferred to the folded edges to use the fault feature. It's basically the opposite of the unfold feature. Click on the icon and then choose the fixed face again. Then we can either choose the bands individually or press collectible Ben's again, and press OK. And now these edges are bent up again. So now that's circular curve is basically wraps around the bend that, so you might not need this for every cut across a band, but it can be useful if you are making cuts that aren't at 90 degrees or if you cutting out on unusual shape, there might be cases where it's not possible to count what you need or to easily cut out what you need in the folded up state. So for example, if we tried to cut a circle on this side in the folded Upstate, will make it roughly the same size. We'll cut upwards by roughly the same amount. We can see from the top. This looks good. But from the side we don't have that curved profile on the top. Then if we were to flatten rpart, we can see maybe another potential issue. If you were making this initially from a flat sheet. We can see that here on the right. We could probably cut this out with the drill pretty easily. But the shape on the left, it would be much harder to Kurt unless you had something like a laser cutter. So as with most of these tools, there's different scenarios that you might use them for different features, really depending on what you need for your end product and how you're gonna manufacturer. To try and speed up your modelling, you should try and think about whether you actually need to use fold and unfold, or whether you can just cut directly across the folded part. Now before we recap, you might be thinking, why can't we just use the flattened feature? Surely that's a much easier way to unfold, unfold your entire model. Well, flatten is a special feature in a way because it always sits at the end of your sheet metal part. And clicking the flatter button basically just suppresses or unsurprising that part. So when it's an suppressed, the model is flattened and when it's suppressed the modal is folded. If we were to flatten the model like so and then add a cut here. You can see it looks the same in the flat version. But now if we press flattened against a refold apart, can see that Kurt was automatically being suppressed. And that's because it's a child feature, the flat pan feature. When the flat pan suppressed, that cuts also suppressed. So the flattened feature is really only intended to be the last feature of your model. You should only really generally use it to flatten your parts for a 2D drawing or to check the parts can actually be made from one sheets. Ideally, you shouldn't really have any features after that. Although having said that, as he get to know sheet metal a bit more than might be rare occasions when you can add cuts and things after the flattening. But ideally, you should use the fold and unfold features. So to recap, folder unfold can be used to unbent and rebound parts of the model. And this can be really useful when you're cutting across bends, especially if you're using unusual shapes or unusual bend angles. To use the features, just click on folder unfold. Then select the fixed phase, and then select the bends. You want a folder unfold. You can also press Collect all bands to automatically get all the appropriate bends in the model. They see features are little bit different to the flattened feature in that they can be used anywhere in your model and you can have features after them. Whereas the flattened feature should only really be used at the end of your model, ideally with nothing else after it in the design tree. In the next video, we're gonna look at Gosset's, which are basically a ridge that goes across a bend to strengthen it. 20. Gusset: Hello and welcome back to the sheet metal course. We've now learned quite a lot of the sheet metal features. And hopefully they aren't just all blending into one. As we get further into these, some of them will be used less regularly than others. And GSA is probably one of these, which is quite specialized. Now a GSA is another term that comes from clothing and fabric making sort of like the hem feature was traditionally a GSA is a triangular piece of material that is added at the seams where two parts join and this adds strength. This term has now moved over to metalwork. And there's actually a couple of things that fabricators might understand by the term GAS it. So we're just going to clarify what it means in SolidWorks, sheet metal. Often with metalwork like welding or framing, a GSA is an extra piece of metal, usually triangular, that's added to give extra strength to the structure. So you might see something like this on a bridge or framing on a roof. This is known as a Gosset plate. And you might see something like this at the bottom of a metal lamppost or sign. And it basically gives extra strength to the join at the bottom there, there's more area to weld around. You might also see something like this on a bicycle frame also to give more extra strength. However, having explained those Gosset's, the NGSS, it's in solid work sheet metal are slightly different. Again, they're usually looks something like this. So it is basically a ridge that's pressed into a bend and it carries out the same function as those other gases in the air adds strength. The Gosset tool is quite simple to use rarely. So let's open our existing part and then delete any extra features as usual. So we've just got the base flange. To add the NGSS it flows, we need a bend to cross. So we're going to add a 90 degree edge flange. It doesn't have to be 90 degrees, but we'll just use that for this example. So let the edge flange and let's add an edge flange on this short edge. I'm going to go 90 degrees and 50 millimeters, but it could be any size or angle rarely. The tool itself is quite easy to use. First we will go on to the sheet metal tab, and then we'll select sheet metal GSA, which is here. Firstly, we need to select the position of the GSA. If you hover over this first box, it says select a bend face or to flat faces. So we can zoom in and just select the bend directly. You see we get a preview of the NGSS it there. Or we can select to flat faces of the band. The faces that you select can be either inside or outside the band. But they can't be a combination. So you can't have worn inside and worn outside. It doesn't let me choose that selection. Now we can set the position exactly. This is a reference line that shows the alignment of the GSA is picked up automatically and usually it sets the NGSS it as perpendicular to the band. But it could also sketch in an angled line. If you wanted a Gosset, there wasn't perpendicular to the band. But that would be really quite a rare feature. So usually it would just be perpendicular. And then this points in pink. You can see here, is where along the line that Gossett will be placed. So that point has been picked automatically, is this pink one in the corner. And you can see we're offset ten millimeters from that, so we're not right in the corner that if I uncheck that offset box, you can see the offset is removed. So now that GSA is centered on that pink dot. And then we can turn back on the offset and we can change the distance. You can also flip the direction. If we flip in this direction, the previews Not going to appear because there's no material over there, so we can't actually make a GSA over there. But if you had selected a midpoint here than you could choose either direction for the offset. We can also clear this position box and we can place that point anywhere we want. But it needs to be on a set point. So you can't just click a random place on the mind has to be at the end or in the midpoint. You could also draw a sketch before you add the Gossett and put a point at a specific place on the line. But usually it's easier just to use the end or the midpoint and then just offset the gossip by the correct amount to get the position that you aren't. Then it's really just a case of setting the parameters you want for the GSA. If we go all the way down to the bottom here on the left and we turn on the full preview. We'll be able to see how these parameters change the preview. Firstly, let's look at these lower ones. This is the width of the GSA. So you can see as I change that eight changes the width in the preview. This is the thickness, which by default is just the thickness of the material. And again, you can see as I change that it changes the preview. Then there's some further options here at the bottom. These are turned off unless you specifically select them and turn them on. So draught adds an angle to the GSA light so you can see there's a slight angle on the sides there. This next one is a filler on the internal corners. And then this one's pretty similar as a filler on the outer corners. So by default, those three options are switched off, but you can turn them on if you need them. Then moving back up, this is the actual size of the Gazette. You've got a lot of control here. And if you look at this little drawing, it can help you understand what you're changing. By default, the indent is symmetrical. So you can see as I change the size, it changes in the preview. But you can also set your own height and base depth if you prefer, by looking at this drawing up here. So you can set the size d1 and d2. That's the length of the sides of this triangle. Or you can set the length of one of the sides and then the angle. But you can only choose two of the three of these at the same time, because the first two dimensions drive the third one. So if we change the height, then the angle is going to change automatically. And if you change the angle, obviously the base size is going to change as well. You can also click this button to flip the dimensions if you need to. Then finally down here, we can add a fully rounded GSA or straight GSA. Usually the tool that makes these is quite rounded because it deforms the metal quite a lot. So if you've got a rounded, smooth tool is less likely to damage the edges of the metal. We can also set square and then fill at the edges as needed so it doesn't have to be fully round or fully square. You do have the option to go in-between those two a little bit. So set whichever options you like and then press OK. And now that GSA is formed that we can also now edit the feature as normal in the feature tree and we can change any of those parameters. You can also expand the feature and you can edit this underlying sketch that change the shape of the Gazette. So we could change the sketch to something like this and that would change the Gosset shape. Now one thing to note is that when we flatten the part like this, by default, the GSA isn't shown. That's because it's usually added by specialists tool. But we can override this setting by folding the part up again and then editing the feature that Gossett feature. And then I'm gonna go down to the bottom and turning on the flat pattern visibility here. So first you'll have to click override documents Settings, and then you can choose either the profile or the center or both. I'm going to add both just to show you what they are. So I've checked both of those boxes, pressed. Ok. It looks the same in the folded state. But now if we press flatten, we can see this point is the center of the GSA. And then this loop is the actual profile of these details can help with adding the exact position to drawing, but you'll probably need an extra note on there were things like the Gosset tool details like the depth and so on. So to recap, Gosset's are a ridge that's pressed into a bend. And this strengthens or stiffens the band. They're pretty easy to add in SolidWorks, just select the sheet metal Gosset tool and then either choose to faces or bend, set the bend reference if needed, but this is usually set automatically. And then also set the position. By default, this will be one of the endpoints of the reference line, and then you can offset by whatever amount you want. We can also select your own point. Then it's just a case of setting your parameters such as the Gosset depth triangle if needed, and he rounded edges and the width. And then you can choose whether this will show in a flat pattern by default it won't. In the next video, we'll have a quick look at the vent feature. This isn't specifically a sheet metal feature. You can use it in normal solid modelling. But it can be very useful in sheet metal because events are pretty common in sheet metal parts. 21. Vent: Welcome back to the course. This video looks at the vent feature, and as we previously mentioned, this isn't specifically a sheet metal feature. You can use it in normal solid modelling, but can be very useful in sheet metal because events are pretty common in sheet metal parts. It basically allows you to quickly cut circular events, something like you see in this picture here. To get started and explain how it works, let's open the part that will be working on and just delete any previous features. So I've just got that flat base flange feature like this. The first thing that we need to do is draw a sketch that's gonna define our event. So start sketch on that base flange. Go Normal to. And I'm just going to grab the circle tool and draw a circle at the origin. This circle will define our van. Lets make it 80 millimeters diameter. And this will be the outer boundary of the vent. You can use different shapes. It doesn't have to be circular like this. But first we'll look at this example, and then we'll quickly look at a different shape later on. Next, we want to add a few spars. So let's grab the offset entities tool. Make sure you don't have any of these Construction Geometry box is selected and then set ten millimeters and just click on that circle that we just drew. Make sure your offsets going inwards. So you might have to press reverse here and then press OK. And that's gonna give us a 60 millimeter diameter circle because it's 80 minus ten millimeters on each side. Now let's do the same thing to add two more circles. Select this inner smaller circle, and then press officer entities again. And we're going to offset ten millimeters inwards again. So now we've got one at 40 millimeters. And then finally, let's do the same thing for this inner circle. So select that circle, press offset entities, then offset inwards by ten millimeters. So then we've got a 20 millimeter circle in the middle. So you should have a series of concentric circles like this. Finally, let's add some ribs. So select the Line Tool, draw a line from the origin vertically upwards to the outer circle. At this stage, your sketch or be fully defined, so everything should be black. If it's not, if you've got some blue lines in there, then try just adding some dimensions if needed. Or make sure that that first circle, the larger 80 millimeter one, is fixed to the origin. So you might just need to grab the center point of that original circle and just drag it back to the orange end to add that coincidence relation. So finally, let's select that vertical line that we just added and add a circular sketch pattern. So select the line, go to the sketch tab and select circular sketch pattern. This is underneath the linear sketch Patton drop-down here. And it will probably come up automatically like this. But let's just check that we've got the same parameters. So we should have 360 degrees equal spacing. For instances. You see we've got 1234 lines. And then the entities to pattern is just that straight line. So in mind says line one, your number might be slightly different there. And then finally, the axis of revolution, which is the center of the pattern that we're actually patterning around. It should have a point in there, which is the origin. So if your preview looks different than try Claire in this top box and then just select the center of those circles. If that looks good, press OK. And if you're having problems with this circular pattern, then you can also just draw in these four lines manually. So now we've got the sketch that is going to drive the vent feature. We've got these concentric circles of all different sizes. And then we've got these four straight lines. Let's exit the sketch and find the ventral. As I mentioned, the vent feature isn't just for sheet metal, but you can find it here on the sheet metal tab. So here is make sure you don't have you sketch the elected and then select the vent tool. You can also select it when you're editing the sketch or from within the sketch, but it will automatically pre-fill some options. So we're gonna make sure that the sketch isn't selected just so we all start from the same empty slate, so we can explain all of the different options. So as usual, we've got quite a lot of options. And this one does look quite complicated. But if we just go through them from top to bottom, then it's fairly straightforward and linear. There's also this message at the top. And this basically says that all we need to do is select certain sketch segments to define the event. The first one to select is called the boundary. This is the outside edge of events. So all of you vent or be inside this line or collection of lines. Make sure you're in this blue box at the top by left clicking. And then left-click on the largest outer circle. And you should see in the preview that that whole area is now cut out. In the face option here we've automatically selected phase one, which is this blue face, because that's the face where the sketch that we just selected is drawn. There's a few options here, will come back to those in a moment. And down here we can see the flow area will also come back to this as we go through the tool. At the moment it says about 5 thousand square millimeters and a 100% open area. What this means is that the entire area of this circle, EG, your event, is about 5 thousand square millimeters and your entire Ven, everywhere within that boundary is currently open. So it's a 100% open. But we'll come back to this in just a moment. The next thing we need to do is select some reps. So left-click and his ribs box here. And then just select those four straight lines in the sketch. And as we do we can see the ribs are added to the event. And now if we look at the flow area, we can see the open area has reduced to 84% because these roads are actually closing off some of that area. We can set the thickness of the ribs here minus defaulted to five millimeters. But I'm gonna try to. And you see the ribs get thinner in the graphics area. But also now we have more open area. It's gone up to 93% because those ribs are basically blocking off less of that open area. There's also some options for the depth of the rib and the direction, but these are grayed out in sheet metal because the ribs are always gonna be the thickness of the sheet that they're cut from. If you were using this vent feature, just the normal model that wasn't sheet metal, then these options would be available. Now we need to select some sparse and these are very similar to the ribs, but they're in a different direction. So left-click in the spar bucks. And then just select two of these middle circles and those spires are added. And the properties are exactly the same as the web. So you can change the thickness here and that adjusts the open area. Now you don't need to select sparse to complete the event. You can just use the ribs, but you can't select any spars until you've selected at least warn rep. So I'd recommend just working from top to bottom here on the left until you've got what you need. The final thing that we're gonna select is the fill-in boundary. Again, you don't need to select this, but if you do it just fills in that entire area solid. So I'm going to select that small inner circle. So that whole inner section is now filled in and you can really see the shape of the event now. Once you're happy with how it looks, press OK, and that event feature is added. Now you can see it in the design tray and you can edit this in the usual way just by clicking on the feature and pressing edit feature. There's a few options that we didn't cover. The first one is the draft is just adds a draft which is an angle to the curve of the events. You probably won't really use this much in sheet metal and you can't really see it if it's just a small angle. The next option is the radius of the cuts. So we can actually round off where all the spars and ribs join each other. So if I try one millimeter here you can see all of those corners are slightly rounded off now. So that's the vent feature in a nutshell. Maybe it can look like a bit of a drawn out process. There are actually once you've got that initial sketch, it's very easy to adjust everything and it's probably much easier than just manually sketching out those vent cuts, which is sort of an old school way of doing it. I used to do it like that before I found out about this event feature. And this option really is a lot more flexible if you want to change anything later on. As I mentioned earlier, it doesn't have to be a circular event. I just quickly start a new sketch and draw something like a sensor rectangle. And then maybe get the line tool and draw some vertical regs. Then I'm gonna re-select the vent feature. I can do this from within the sketch. And this time for the boundary, we can have multiple outer lines because we've got these four lines of the rectangle. So you can select them one by one. And we get that cutout. And then for the ribs, we can choose these lines. Then we can change the thickness and we can round off the edges and make any changes that we want and press OK to add that feature. So that's roughly the same sort of thing, but just a bit of a different shape there. So to recap, the vent tool is a good way to add these vents that are fairly common in sheet metal. And it gives you a lot more flexibility if you want to modify them later on. Firstly, you need to draw a base sketch which will define the boundary of your van and whether it's Ghani ribs or spars. And then you can use the vent feature. You can select that boundary, select any ribs or spars, and then select the thickness and any other parameters that you want and add those reps. The next tool we're going to look at is locked, it bends. And these allow you to create a transition between two different profiles. So something like going from a square bend to a more rounded bend. 22. Lofted Bend Introduction, and Formed Method: Hello and welcome back to the sheet metal course. We're really getting through these features well now and the next one we're going to look at is the lofted bend. This can be used to create a transition between two different profiles. So maybe something like going from a square Ben to a more rounded band. And there's many times this might be useful. For example, it might be something like connecting a round pipe, like an exhaust pipe, maybe with a square bracket or something like that. There are two main types of lofted bends in SolidWorks, bent and formed. Both of them start from the same base x. In this video, we'll quickly take a look at both of them. And then in the next video, we'll take a look at the bent version in a bit more detail because it's a little bit more complex. Lofted bends or one of the few sheet metal features that doesn't need a base plant. All you need is to open profile sketches. So let's start an entirely new part. We need to draw to open profiles. So firstly, let's start a sketch on the front plane and user centered rectangle and draw a rectangle, something like this. So it is a 150 millimeters wide gonna make IT AT high. The profiles for these lofts can't have sharp coordinates. So I'm good to round off these corners by adding a ten millimeter sketch, fill it to the corners. And another important limitation is that the profile must be open. It can't be a fully closed profile like this. To fix this, I'm just going to trim away a small section of the profile. So I'm gonna make a horizontal sense line going out to the middle here. And then I'm going to offset that line just by small amount, let's say one millimeter. I'm gonna make that offset line into a construction line. And then I'm just going to grab the trim tool, get power trim. I'm just gonna cut away this little area here. So now we haven't got fully closed profile here. We've got a small gap here on the left. There's our first profile. So now we need to draw a second one. Firstly, let's add a new plane for this profile. To do this, let's just select the front plane. Then hover over the edge of the plane in the graphics area. And so you get this little icon with four blue arrows. Then hold down control and just left-click and drag away from the front plane. And that should add a new plane. So just to show you again, select the initial plane, the front plane, then hover over the edge of it until you get this icon. And then hold down control and left-click and drag away. And we'll set that at a distance of a 150 millimeters. We can start a sketch on this new plane. And I'm just gonna go Normal to, and I'm going to draw a similar profile, but just much more rounded. So I'm going to use the slot tool for this. I'm going to use a center point straits law. So this is also going to start at the origin, going to drag it out. So roughly the same size and add some smart dimensions. Let's make it after 40 on the sides and then 100 on this straight section. So remember our two limitations for the LaFree files. We can't have sharp corners and we can't have a closed profile. So we don't have any sharp corners in this, but we do have a closed profile. So let's do a similar thing to that first sketch. I'm going to add a horizontal center line. Then I'm going to offset that center line one millimeter upwards. And this time you can click offset geometry under the Construction Geometry options. This just means that the offset line will automatically be a construction line. Then when that's added, you can get the trim tool again, just going to trim a small gap there. And we might get an error that says we're gonna destroy this dot entity. That's okay. If you slot turns blue like this, you can redefine it just by getting to display delete relations here on the sketch tab, clicking on the drop down and just pressing fully defined sketch and pressing OK now will automatically define the entire sketch. So now we have two separate sketches. They're both open profiles. They don't have any sharp corners, and they're on different planes. And we can use these to create the loft. To do this select lofted bend is on the sheet metal tab. And it's one of the few options that will be available because we don't have a base flange already. The first thing that we need to do is select the loft profiles. This can be done here on the left. And they should be selected in a similar way to how you select profiles in a normal loft in solid modelling. So by this, I mean, you should try and select corresponding points on each profile. So you see, if I select this top right corner on this profile, should select a similar position. Second profile, and then we get a nice preview like this. If I clear the selection and then select the top right one on the first profile, and then select the opposite one on the next profile. We don't get any preview because the loft is essentially twisted so it won't work properly. So I always try and select roughly the same place on each profile. As we mentioned at the start, there's two main options here, bent and formed. They can be selected at the top on the left here. And as I switch between them, hopefully you see there's a slight difference in the preview there. The formed option looks much more smooth and flowing, looks much more like a traditional lock feature. And there's also far fewer options here on the left. Let's look at the formed 1 first because it's a little bit simpler. So we've selected the profiles, we've got the correct preview, and we can set the thickness here if we need to. This is the sheet thickness. Then we can press OK. And make this feature. So it's come out as a nice smooth piece. Everything looks correct. We can flatten the part and it does flattened correctly. If we look from the top, you can see it's a slightly strange shape. It's not quite square there, but also it doesn't have any band lines. So we could probably Ben this part, but it would be quite hard to make without specialized tooling. Let's fold it up again and try and change it to a bent version so you can see the difference. The problem is if we now edit this feature and tried to change the type of lofted bend, we no longer have the option. What we need to do is delete that lofted bend and then re-added again using the same sketches. So let's select lofted bend again. This time let's try to bend. Method will select the profiles. And you see this time instead of a smooth bend, we've got loads of little areas and we've got loads more options on the left. The preview absorbed. Okay, so let's press ok to make this feature. So now we can see that the feature is sort of an approximation of the previous one that we made that's got all these little bend lines on it. So this bent option actually might be easier to make because we can actually see where all the bends are going to be. Even though it doesn't give us a shape that's quite as smooth as the previous option. So formed looks great, but it can be much harder to make. The best option can be easier to make. And we'll look at this more in the next video. But for now we'll just recap the process of getting here to the band. To create your lofted bend, you need two profiles. They need to have no sharp corners and they need to be open profiles. Select the lofted bed feature and then select the profiles to select the same point on each profile roughly. Then you can choose either the bent or the formed method. The formed option will give you a smooth transition or bend between the two profiles. Whereas the bend option gives you a series of straight lines that approximate the band, but it's probably a bit simpler to manufacture. In the next video, we'll take a bit of a closer look at all of those sub options under the bend option. 23. Lofted Bends Bent Method: Welcome back to the lofted bend videos. In this video we're going to look at that bent manufacturing option in a bit more detail because he has quite a few more options than the formed option. So we should be at this stage with our model. It should have a lofted bend, something like this. If you've got the formed one, you can just delete that and then re-add the lofted bend feature, select those profiles, and then just select the bent option. First up, let's have a look at the feature in the graphics area. You can see on the curve here, we've got a load of small straight sections that approximate that curve. And if we press flatten and I can see we've got a series of Ben lines. So this would maybe be a bit easier to manufacture than that formed method that would probably need some specialists tooling. As we saw briefly in the previous video, that Ben options were quite a few sub options, and we're going to look at those quite briefly now. So I'm going to fold the part of again. Then I'm going to edit the lofted bend feature. Now we have four different faceting options here. And essentially these options exactly control how these straight sections or facets are created. They should all give you roughly the same output, but it depends on the exact profiles and what you're trying to make. These lofty Ben's can be a bit temperamental and they don't always give you the output that you want. Let's go through these from top to bottom. Core tolerance is the first one. This version sets a maximum difference between the curved arc and the straight section of the bent left. So if you look at the little drawing on the icon, you can see a picture of it here. So round here there's an ideal curved arc. And here is a straight line, which is the actual line that we've gotten are bent. So by putting half a millimeter down here, we're saying that that straight section has gotta be half a millimeter or less from that ideal. Ok? So you can see if we increase that dimension, then we can see the straight sections get bit larger as they move further away from the arc. So a smaller dimension here will give you a more refined bend that follows the arc more closely. This refer to endpoint option just basically allow Solid Works to round off any sharp corners. So if you get any bend relief cuts automatically added to your life that you don't want. You can try toggling this option and seeing if it improves it. The next option is number of bands. This is fairly straightforward, just allows you to set the number of bends per segment. Obviously more bends will give you a smoother look to the curve. But this will also take more work in real life to physically bend all of those sections. So at the moment we only have two bends. You can see as I increase this value will get more bands and it looks smoother. But in real life it'll take longer to actually make all of these bands. So there's a bit of a trade off there. You can also click on these pink circles and change the faceting option just for that segment. So we could have a different option for each of the sections if we want it to. The third option is called segment length. And this lets you define the maximum length of the straight sections. So a smaller number here, it will mean that your corners look more curved. So as I increase this distance, the straight sections are getting longer. So we're getting a less refined curve around the edge there. Then finally we've got segment angle. This sets the maximum angle between two adjacent segments. So the lower we make this number, the tie to the curve will be. So you see as we reduce this number, the curve gets more rounded. If we put this up to say, 40 degrees, it looks much more square around there. So really there's quite a few sort of options there, and it's up to you which one you want to use. So that's an overview of bent, lofted bends. As I mentioned, this tool can be a bit temperamental. So try playing around with different types of bands if you can't get what you want exactly straight away. This can be quite useful tool though if you know exactly what you're trying to achieve. So to recap, lofted bends, they weren't generally in quite a similar way to normal loss. But we need to profiles. They both need to be open and they can't have sharp corners. Then we can select each of the profiles. And it's good idea to try and select the same point on the profiles. Then we've got two main options, bent or formed. Formed generally looks much smoother, can work better, but it doesn't include the bend lines. So often need specialists tooling and can be hard to make. The bent, lofted bends method gives more of an approximation of the curve, but it can be easier to actually make it depending on what kind of process and machinery you have access to. There's many different sub options within the bent, lofted bends. And you can also apply these to each individual segment of the laughed. So that's lofted bends. In the next video, we'll look at the last new sheet metal tool, which is the tab and slot tool. 24. Tab and Slot: The last tool that we're going to look at in this section is the tab and slot tool. This is pretty similar to the vent tool in that it's not strictly a sheet metal tool, but it can be used in sheet metal and is mainly used to create tabs and slots in multibody or multi sheet parts to make it easier to weld sections together. So let us look at this in more detail in an example. Start an entirely new part and we want to create two sheets. So to base flanges that are butting up against each other. Start anew sketch on the front plane, and we'll get the centered rectangle tool. Let's draw a rectangle at the origin and make it say 60 by 50 millimeters. Then we'll go to the sheet metal tab and we'll turn this into a base flange, will make it nice and thick so we can see what's going on. Let's try five millimeters. So now we have our first base flange there, and we want another one butting up against it in the corner. To start this new one, let spin the first one around and then start a sketch on this face. And then go Normal to. And this time let's get a corner rectangle, which is this one. Let's start from that top corner and then drag out, can drag that bottom corner down to the bottom corner of the first flange so we can lock that height and then we can set a distance as well. Then when that's sketches fully defined, I'm gonna go back to the sheet metal tab and create another base flange. So now we have two separate base flanges here, two different sheets. And if we look here in the cut lest we can expand this. And we've got two different sheets, 12. The sheets are entirely separate so they aren't joined. And that happens lot soil will basically cut slots into one of these shapes and it will make tabs on the corresponding sheet. The tavern slots all can be found on the sheet metal toolbar here. And also searched for it up here. And you can find it in insert, sheet, metal, tab and slot. So let's select that tool. And like many other tools initially it looks really complicated, but we're just gonna go through this step-by-step. So here at the top it says select an edge for the tabs and a corresponding face for the slot. The tab face is automatically selected after we select the edge. So let's select the Edge where we want to add the feature. Generally I find it's much easier to select the inside edge. It just stops you accidentally selecting the wrong sheet. If we try and select the outside here, we've got two edges that are right next to each other. So it's easy to select the wrong one. If you spin around, there's only one edge inside here so you can't get the wrong one. So I'm going to make sure I'm in that top box, the tab edge box. And then I'm gonna select that inner edge. Now we need to select the face for the second box. This is the slot face, the face where the slots will actually be cut into. So I'm going to spin around and select this one. And you see now we get that preview of the tabs and slots. We've automatically got these two points. This purple point is the start point, and then this green point at the bottom is the endpoint. If you make a mistake with your selection or you don't like your preview. You can also just click again to de-select, or you can just clear the selection in the boxes on the left. So I'm going to press OK to make this feature now. And we can have a bit of a look at what's actually being created here. So if we hide each of the sheets in turn, firstly, we've got the slots cut in here. And then on the second sheet we've got some tabs that interlock with the slots. And these will just make it easier to weld these two halves together or join them together. Then if we edit the feature again, we can go over some of these options in more detail. But before we added to note that we now have two features in the design tree. We've got the slot feature and the tab feature. And that's because these slots and tabs are actually on different sheets. So they're different features, but they're linked together. So if you want to edit any of the details, you have to edit the tab feature, you can't directly edit the slot feature. If we tried to edit this lot feature will just get this warning that says please edit the pad tab feature instead. So we can now edit that type feature. And let's have a look at this in more detail. All of these options are fairly self-explanatory once you start to play around with them. And the feature is quite flexible. Firstly, we can set whether tabs and slots actually start and end. If you don't want them to go the full length of an edge, then you can adjust these color-coded dots to indicate the start and endpoints. You can also offset the start and end points, both of them, or either one with this option here. So we can offset from the top with this one and offset from the bottom of this one. And you see as we increase the offset, that tabs actually move closer together to fit within that remaining gap. So I'm going to de-select that. And next we've got the spacing of the tab and slots. So we can either set equal spacing with a number of instances. So you said the number of tabs and slots, and they'll automatically be spaced out like this. And as we add more instances, that tab spacing gets smaller automatically, just so they can actually fit into that length. The other option is spacing length. This one lets you set the spacing and then it automatically changes the number of instances as you change that spacing. So it's up to you which one you want to use. Both of them give pretty similar end result rarely. Next, we can change the length of the tabs. So if I change this to six, for example, we can see they're just slightly there. We can also change how high they are. So by default, we can go all the way up to this surface, or we could go blind if we want to make them longer or shorter. And you can also do offset from surface. If I'm just going to put them back to, up to surface. Then here you can change the edge type so we can angle or fill at the edge. So we've really got a lot of flexibility here. Then finally, we've got loads of options for the slot as well. The first one is no through cut. And by default the slots are cut all the way through the sheet. If we just want a partial curve, then we can select this option. But now that I've selected that, it looks like there isn't any difference. That's because the slot Kurt is always the depth of the tab plus any gap or offset. So now if we make the tab shorter using this blind option here, and then I press OK. You can see the slot cut now doesn't go all the way through. These would actually be a big pain to actually make. So unless you've got a specific reason, then I would recommend is keeping the slots all the way through, through all. So now if I edit the feature again and just quickly turn off that NOW through corruption. You can see, even though the tab doesn't go all the way through, the slot cut does. And then down here we have the offset amount. This is how much larger the slot will be then the tap. You see in my case here, the tabs off five millimeters and the slot is 0.1. logic on each side. So the actual slot will be 5.2. So it's about five millimeters plus 0.01. on both sides. You can't actually set 0 to this. You always have to have a tiny gap there to stop the parts merging together. So this option is the length and this is the width. And then this button links them both together. And then finally here you can change the coordinate type. This might not update in your preview. But this feature can be helpful because it can be difficult to cut a sharp corner unless you've got certain tools. Just be aware that any radius or Shamatha in those corners will have to be smaller than the tab offset, so you still have a gap in there. So for example, if we use an offset of quarter of a millimeter, 0.25. and a radius of 0.5, then that works fine. You can see the radius here. And we still have a gap there between the slot and the tab. But now if we edit the feature again and we adjust this, if I change that radius up to one millimeter and now press OK. Now that feature doesn't create. That's because that radius is too large. So now the tab and slot are actually clashing. So instead for the radius, I'll try 0.75. And now when I press okay, This feature is created. We can see the radius in there is a little bit closer to the other part. If this was one millimeter instead of 0.75 millimeters, then that radius would be a bit larger that and it would be overlapping. So that's why that feature failed with these parameters. So this is an overview of the tab and slot tool. So really useful little feature for joining multibody or multi sheet parts. To recap, I'm just gonna delete that tap. And the tab and slot tool allows us to easily create Sampson slots in multi sheet parts to allow for easier assembly in welding. To start off, we need two sheets or two parts which are close to each other or busting up to each other. Then we can select the taverns lot tool and then select the edge for the tap. Then next we select the corresponding phase for the slot. And then it's just a case of adjusting the size of the slot and all of the smaller parameters. In your design tree, you can have two features, the town feature and the slot feature. You can't edit a slot feature directly. But if you edit the tab feature than you'd be able to change anything in the slot feature. So that's all of the basic tools now covered. The next set of videos, we're going to have a look at the various different corner options that are available in sheet metal. 25. Closed Corner: The next set of tools we're going to look at is actually four tools lumped into one. And they're all based around corner details. The raw, reasonably simple tool. So we'll look at them one by one. And the first one is called closed corner. As the name suggests, it's just closes a corner of an edge phalange for example. And we'll show how to use this now. Open that base flange part that we were working on and just delete any events or anything just so we've got a single base flange. And then let's just add two edge flanges on adjacent edges. So we've got a corner there. I'm going to go with 90 degrees and 50 millimeters. But as long as they're next to each other, doesn't really matter which parameters you use. So if we look in the corner here, we've actually got a bit of a gap and maybe we don't want that to close it. We can just select the closed corner option. All of these corner options are under the same button here on the sheet metal toolbar. You can just click on it, click on the dropdown, and let's choose closed corner. Here on the left, we've got some options. The first one is to choose which face we want to extend. So let's zoom in. And we could select either one of these small faces. We could use this one or this one. And I'll give us the same result, but basically just switched around. So let's try choosing this one. And you see we get a preview of what's going to happen with disclosed corner. So if we zoomed in, we've extended this edge slightly, and we've also extended this one to come up to it. So here on the left in the faces to match box, that corresponding face has automatically been selected by the tool. So this option is just going to close up that corner. If I press OK, you can see that corner gap is now much smaller. And if we flatten apart, you can see this edge flange now actually extends a little bit beyond the bend line there. If we edit the closed corner again, there's a few options on the left. Here we can change the corner type. So this is how the corners join. The first one is but where the two corners meet like this, or there's overlap where one side overlaps the other. Or there's overlap which is basically the opposite. So once I'd overlaps the other side on the laps, we can also change the gap distance here. You can see that increases the distance there. Then this option is the overlap, overlap ratio. Now because this is a ratio, it always has to be between 01. And this controls exactly how the under lap or overlap fits together. So if we put one here, we're gonna overlap with a full thickness of the sheet. If I put half 0.5. then we're only going to overlap with half of the sheep. The open bend region is an option down here that just determines how we're gonna cut away this bend region at the bottom. So this is where the option selected. We've trimmed away that corner section down there. And this will help with the bending if we go to the opposite. So if we turn off this option, then the corner will instead look like this. So we've got no corner relief there. Then let's edit the feature again and we'll just have a quick look at the other options co planar faces. This is best explained with another quick example. So I'm just going to add the corner and I'm going to drag up above the corner so it switched off. And then I'm gonna cut away a little section on this flange here. Just gonna make a simple car and only go through the thickness of that first flange. So we don't have a single edge going all the way up there. Now if we drank back down again, so we've got the closed corner in the model again, and we edit that feature. So if we turn off the co planar face option, then we only actually have the faces that are selected in the box. If we turn it back on, it will automatically pick up that top section as well. Because it's coplanar with the bottom. So it means it's lined up with that face at the bottom. So these two final options, narrow basically just reduces the gap in that bend area. This depends on your exact geometry. Sometimes it can be hard really to see any difference there. And then auto propagation basically just automatically selects the faces to match up based on your first selection. So this is a really useful little tool good for filling in your corners. This tool can be especially helpful if we've got something like this. So I'm going to add an extra flange gonna make the angle so it's not 90 degrees, so it's actually angled slightly away from this other flange. So you see we've got an increasing gap there as the flange goes up. If we use the closed corner and select this face, then we can automatically close off most of that gap. So it's a very quickly recap. Close corner, as the name suggests, allows you to close up corners. Or you have to do is select the tool and then select the faces. And there's many different options within the tool. Up next we will have a look at welded coordinates. 26. Welded Corner: Continuing on with the corner options. This next one is quite a simple tool, the welded corner. And it basically just adds a representation of a weld bead to your corners. So I'm going to delete those extra corner details that we added in the previous video. So we don't have a closed corner anymore. We've just got these two edge phalanges on the side of the base flange. So imagine we want to weld along this corner. Or we have to do is go to the corner options and then choose welded corner. Then is choose the face where we want to add the weld. So it could either be this one or this one. I'm going to select this one and we get that yellow preview of the weld. And they automatically goes round to that adjacent flange. There is some different options on here. We can add a fill it or not. So if we turn that off, we've got a square edge there. If we turn it on, we've got that rounded edge. We can adjust the texture. This is just a visual texture of the well-paid. And we can also use a weld symbol. We can also add a stopping point if we don't want to well, to go all the way up. And you can do this by making a sketch on that face before you add this welded corner and just plotting a point at where you want the world to stop, then selecting that in this option here. So then if we press OK, we've just got this visual representation of the weld. And then Solid Works is really is mostly just a visual thing more than anything else. If we flatten apart, you can see there's no world feature there. And the weld feature in the design tree has been automatically suppressed. However, these welds are actually included in the overall weight and volume of your part. If I just quickly change the material to something like steel and then go to the evaluate tab and press mass properties. So we've got a mass of 274.9 grams, then a volume of about 35,200 millimeters. For then close this and suppress that weld feature. And if we have a look again, you can see now I've got 274 and also the volumes gone down a little bit, 35,100 cubic millimeters. So it's a very small difference, but it has changed. So the welded corners is quite a simple feature. Rarely, it's mainly used just to add that visual QT model and to add these welded areas for your drawings. Next up is the corner break or corner trim tool. 27. Corner Break: Continuing on with our corner features. The third option for us is the break corners or the corner trim. This tool basically allows you to fill it or shampoo corners so you can remove sharp edges, maybe make your items a little bit easier to manufacture, or maybe use it for some kind of structural reason. Just going to delete that welded corner. Then the brake corner option is the third option here under the corners button. This basically allows us to either shampoo or fill it the sharp edges of our model. What we have to do is choose the brake type. So either shampoo, which is angled, or affiliate which is rounded, and then set the size. Then we can just choose which corners we want to break. The good thing about this tool is we can't just choose the entire face and it will pick up all the corners on that face. You can also get internal coordinates. So if I add a quick tap, so I'll start sketch on this face, gonna get the Rectangle Tool. And I'm going to draw a rectangle here, add some dimensions, and then press the tab option. Then if I choose the brake corner again, got the same settings. I can click on this face and we can pick up those two external corners. I can also zoom in and I can manually select this internal corner. So with external quantity or cut away material with internal corners, you'll add a little bit material there. So you might be wondering a little bit what the point of this isn't it just the same as the fill it or the shampoo tools? And it's a good question really, the main advantage of this is that it's much faster to do it like this. We can just click on a face and all of the corners on that face will be selected. If we tried to do this with a Philip tool. So we select the fill tool, set the same size and then try to select that face. It just won't work. So he could zoom in and select those edges individually. It's quite easy to select the wrong one. If we select something like this, then it's really hard to make something like this in sheet metal. And we don't actually want this. We just want these small vertical edges. So you can't just zoom right in and choose the manually. This is a very simple model, so it's quite easy to do that. Imagine if you've got a really complex model using that corner break option can maybe save you a few seconds, five seconds on each edge that imagine if you've got hundreds of edges, can potentially save you a lot of time. Another advantage of this tool is that you can use it on a flattened part. I'm just going to delete those break corner features that we added. And then I'm gonna flatten the part. And this is one of the few options where I'd say it's okay to use a feature like this after flattening the part. Now that we've got the flat part, if we go to the corners option C, the only one available is corner trim because we can't really add wells or anything if all of the parts are flat. So now we have two options here. We've got relief options here at the top. We'll ignore this for now and we'll look at this in the next video. But down here we've got the break corner options. So we can click in this box and manually select all of those edges again. Or we can just click in this box that says Collect all corners and we get all of those corners in the model. You can also choose internal corners only. So if I clear that selection, then check in this internal corners only box and press collects all coordinates. We've just got that single internal corner. For some reason there is no option for external corners only, but you can just collect them all and then manually remove the internal ones. So this might just be something that you use after you've completely finish apart, you flatten it, and then you can just round off the corners for manufacturing. Just one thing to know if we do now and flatten this part, we will lose those corner terrain features because they were applied to the flattened version. So they can't be here in the UN flattened version. If you want them in the folded up model, you can either add them manually like we just did. We can use the unfold tool and then collect all of those bands and then choose the fold tool to fold it back up again. So this covers the corner trim or corner break option. Like I said, it's quite similar to shampoos and fillets. It's just a little bit easier to use. Just select the tool and then set the size, set the type, either a shampoo or a Phillip. Then is choose the corners where you want the feature to be added. Next up is the corner relief tool. 28. Corner Relief: The final tool of the four corner options is called the corner relief. If you click on this at first, it looks quite complicated, but actually it's not too bad. Firstly, scope is just the sheet that we're working with. So probably automatically prefer like this. Then we can choose either a to bend corner or three Bent Corner. Uh, to bend corner is something like this where we've just got to benz next to each other. We don't have any three ben corners in this model. So if I select three bend and then press Collect corners, tell us there aren't any three ben corners here. If we select to bend and press collects all coordinates, it will pick up that corner automatically and the faces of the corner will appear down here. Then we can basically just add some relief cuts in the corner here so we can cut away some material to make it easier to bend. There's a load of different options, basically just different shapes of how the relief will be kept. For some of the options, we can use an actual size or we can use a ratio. So we can link it to the thickness of the sheet. And each versions got different sub options. So let's just try circular and then press OK. And then that corner elif is added. And this will just help with bending and agile manufacturing in real life. Now a three corner band might look something like this. Let's add a couple more edge flanges on this edge here. So we've got a more complicated bent here. We've got three Ben's coming in, 123. But the corner relief can still basically work in the same way. So let's select the corner elif tool. This time we can choose three bent corner. And if we press Collect all corners, it will automatically get that three ben corner. And it's got all three of those phases there. Then we can just change the type of relief, the shape and the size and everything. And that will help us with that corner in the same way that we can press OK. And now we've cut away that corner relief there. Now the final thing to look at is, you might remember in the previous video, when we flatten the part, we had some extra corner relief options under the break corner option. So we'll just have a quick look at those. Firstly, I'm gonna delete these corner relief options in the folded part. And then I'm gonna flatten the part. And then now under the corner options, we've only got the coordinate trim available. So we're gonna select that. And then here at the top we've got some relief options. We can now press Collect or corners and will just automatically get those corners where bends are. And then we can change the relief type here is a few different options. Can change the size and we can press OK to add those. So it's basically just adding the corner relief in a flattened state instead of an unfolded state. Remember if we add this and then we now unflattering apart, this corner or leaf will be removed. So there might be cases where you want to use this, where you just want to either corner relief right at the end just before you export the parts for cutting and manufacturing. So Corner relief is a tool that depending on what you making, you might barely use or you might use it on nearly every model that you make. But luckily it's fairly straightforward. Or we need to do is select the tool and then choose collects all corners on, uh, to bend or three bend corner, and then apply the corner relief and change the parameters to what we want. We can also apply it to a flatten model right at the end and then do that entire step right at the end. In the next section, we'll start to look at a few non sheet metal techniques for making your parts and then converting them into sheet metal. 29. Insert Bends: Over the previous section, we looked at site in sheet metal parts with base flanges. And we covered most of the sheet metal tools and features. But as well as creating base functions, you can also model solid parts and then change them into sheet metal later. There's two main ways to do this. I'm just going to start a new part. So we can use converts a sheet metal, which is this option, is grayed out at the moment. Or we can use the insert bends option, which is also grayed out. Now before we start this video, I just wanna say that in general, it's best to try and stick to sheet metal versions of your parts because generally it just gives you a bit more flexibility if you want to change anything. Sometimes it can appear that modelling certainly normally in a non sheet metal away and then converting it to sheet metal is quicker. But in the long run, if you need to change anything, then sheet metal usually works out quicker and it's much more flexible. The insert bends option allows us to convert a shelled part to sheet metal. For this, we need a solid body with a uniform thickness. So all of the walls need to be the same thickness. Or you can use apart modeled using thin feature. And we'll show an example of both of these. For the first one, I'm just going to initially model a simple solid cube just using a bog standard bas, basic strewed feature to share how this works. I'm just going to start a sketch on the top plane, going to get a sense a rectangle. Draw at the origin. We're gonna make it 150 wide and 150 high. And then I'm gonna do a Boss Extrude also 150 mid plane. So we've basically got a cube there that's completely solid. Now I am going to use the shell feature to shell out or hollow out this cube. So the shelf each year is here on the Features tab. I'm gonna set the walls to two millimeters thick. And then for faces to remove, just gonna click this top face. Then when I press OK, this cube is hollowed out. So if we go to a cross-section view, we can see that the wall thickness is the same all the way through the part. So if we had a solid part like this, we can now convert this to sheet metal by using the insert bends feature. To use the feature, just go to the sheet metal tab and then click Insert bands, which is here. And now we've got all of our usual sheet metal parameters. So you've got the bend radius here. You can't set the thickness because that's determined by the wall thickness that we already have in the model. But then you've got the bend relief and the author relief and everything down here. The first thing we need to do after we've set these parameters is choose a fixed phase. And this will basically become our base font. It's the face that all the bends are made relative to the face that won't move. Let's click in this first box and then select the underside face of r cube. And then don't do this. I'm just going to show you as an example. If I press OK now it says no bends found. But it looks like something has happened. We have actually converted the part to a sheet metal part because we can see we've got the sheet metal folder here. We've got cut less, we've got flat Batson and so on. But clearly it's not a proper sheet metal part because it's not a constant single thickness. And we can't flatten it. So it looks like we've missed a step somewhere here. So I'm going to press Control zed to undo back to the point where we were. So now we've just got the key feature and the shelf feature. So we don't have any of those sheet metal features. We've just got that hollow Q. Now I'm going to try the insert bends feature again and see if we can figure out what we missed. So let's select the feature again. As before, we're gonna set the fixed face the same one as before, but before we press OK. Now we're going to add what's called the rate parameters. So basically we want to unbind all of these sides. But we can't do that at the moment because they're all joined to each other. So it's actually unfold them. We've gotta rip along the edges somewhere. If you imagine if this was a real box made of cardboard or something, then we'd have to rip along the sides before we could fold them down. So click in the fit parameters box and then just select these four edges one by one. See as I select them, we get these yellow arrows. These just indicate the direction of the rep. We look at that a little more in a moment. But first we'll actually just try out these standard rips. You can adjust the gap direction here on the left. I'm going to keep it as 0.1. And then when I press okay, it says auto relief cuts were made for Warner Moore bends. And now if we press OK, we can see we've got low sheet metal features again. And our model looks slightly different. If we look at the bottom here, we've got these bends on the bottom edges and we've got this auto relief in the corners. And then also if we zoom in, we've got that small rip gap on each of these edges. So we can now flatten the part if needed. And we can see that corner relief in the corners. And we can see that this is just a normal sheet metal part now. So if we look in the design theory now we can see what's going on. I'm going to drag all the way up. We started off with our solid cube and then we added the shell feature, which hollowed out the cube. Next we've got the sheet metal feature. This has got all of our sheet metal parameters in it. Then next we have the Rip feature, and this is what cuts those edges. And if we zoom in, we can see we've got a small rip current on each edge. Now we can actually insert the Rip Kurtz on their own. That tool is appear on my command manager, but then we'd have to manually bend these edges. So using the insert bands, we can do everything in one step. Next, moving down, we've got flattened bends which flattens these bends obviously. And then we've got process bends, which bends them back up again. And then right at the bottom we've got the flat pattern feature, which is suppressed as usual. So this is quite an easy way to convert a solid part with a constant wall thickness into a sheet metal part. Now we'll just have a closer look at those reps and how we can adjust different options to give us different end results. If you look at these flanges at the top, you can see this one overlaps, this one, this one overlaps they want. So they're overlapping all the way round. If we wanted something more symmetrical, we could adjust those rip directions. If you edit that RET feature in the design tray, we can then adjust these yellow arrows and we can change the direction of the rep. You can click on the arrows directly and that will adjust them. You can also select the edge here on the left. Sometimes it can be quite hard to see which one you've got selected. C as I select this one, edge three is slightly highlighted here. And then you can press changed direction. So I'm going to change the routes or something like this. So it's a bit more symmetrical there. And then I'm going to press OK. And now if we look at the flanges, these two outer ones overlap, these two and ones are overlapped. If you look in this corner where the mouse cursor is, just gonna press control Z to undo. So you can see the difference. So you see we can change from overlapping in this direction to overlapping in this direction. You can also rip in two directions at once. So if we edit the writ feature again, you can't do this just by clicking the arrow. You have to select the edge on the left and pressed change direction. Just keep pressing it. And so we have two arrows instead of one on each edge and do the same for the other edges. So when you have two arrows on each edge, press OK. And now if we zoom in, you can see the edges don't overlap at all. They've just got that little gap there. So that covered how to use the insert bends feature on solid parts. And before we finish the video, just going to very quickly show you how you can use this on thin feature parts. So I'm going to start a new part, going to start a sketch on the front plane. And then I'm just gonna use the line tool to draw a very simple profile, just an offset shaped like this. And then I'm gonna go to extremely boss base, just gonna extrude this with the thin feature option. Let's say set the thickness to two and then press OK. So we've got a very simple shape. There could be a very simple bracket or something like that. So if we wanted to convert this solid part to a sheet metal part, or we have to do is go to the sheet metal tab, go to Insert bands. And then we need to choose the fixed face again. This time we don't need to choose any writ parameters because there's nothing to rep. So all we have to do is set the bend radius and then press OK. And that bend radius is added to any sharp corners. And now we can flatten this part is just a normal sheet metal part now. So this can be useful for things like brackets and really simple thin feature parts. To recap, I'm gonna switch back to that other part. So insert bands is a feature that can be used to convert solid parts into sheet metal parts. First we select the tool, then we select the fixed face. We can set all of the sheet metal parameters at this point. If we have any edges that need ripping when we unfold, we can select those now. Can also use the rip Beecher separately if you prefer. Then press OK and the bends and rips will be added. So this is a really useful tool for converting to sheet metal easily. Up next we'll have a look at the convert to sheet metal tool, which is pretty similar rarely that has some important differences. 30. Convert to Sheet Metal - Introduction: Convert to sheet metal is another tool that allows you to take solid parts and make them into sheet metal parts is very similar to the tool we used in the previous video in a lot of ways. So you might have an external part that you've imported from somewhere else. Or maybe you've got team member who isn't that familiar with sheet metal. And they just want to give you an overall shape to work with. We'll show how it works with an example. So you can download the shape in the exercise files or we can just draw it out directly. This is just an extrude that's 100 millimeters wide. And I'll leave the sketch up on the screen for a moment if you just want to copy that and extrude it yourself. So imagine you've been given this solid object by a boss and you've been asked to make it into a hollow part that can be made from sheet metal. You could just measure everything up and then remake it from scratch. But in this case, it's probably easier if you just convert it. In this video, we'll look at the basic process of using converts a sheet metal. And then in the next one, we'll look at some of the options in a bit more detail. So the first thing you need to do is choose the converter sheet metal tool, which can be found here next to the base flange. On the left, we get a lot of sheet metal options. And the main difference between this and the insert bands is that you can use this on an entirely solid body. You don't need to use it on a part that's already been shelled out. So down here we have the thickness that bend radius and a load of other options, and we'll go through these now, the tool is actually very similar in operation to the insert bends that we just looked at. First we have to select a fixed face. This is essentially your base flange. So I'm gonna clear this box and I'm going to choose this bottom face here. Then we can set the thickness and the bend radius. So let's try to millimeters for the thickness and one millimeter for the bend radius. The next thing we have to do is choose the edges. We want a bent. So clicking this band edges box and then go into modeling the graphics area and just select the edges we want to bend. So I'm going to select this one and this one on the other side. And as we choose them, you can see they turn pink. It's the same color as they spend edges box here, so it's all color-coded. We can also try selecting this line. And as you can see, these other ideas turn purple. And they've been selected automatically down here where it says RIP edges. So solid work knows if we want to unfold these three pink edges, then we need to rip along these two purple edges. So this is a little bit smarter than the previous feature. And I'm now just gonna press OK so we can make this feature and have a look what this creates. So any bends that weren't selected, those faces have been removed from the model. We've ripped along these edges and we've added bends along these lower wretches. If for some reason it was really important that we didn't have a gap here, that we had a bend here. Instead, we can now edit list converts a sheet metal part, and we can bend it in a slightly different way. So I'm going to clear those band edges and I'm going to select some different edges. So maybe if we didn't want a gap here, we could add a bend here on the bottom, and then these two curved edges. And we've automatically writ along those bottom edges now. So if I press OK now, we've got a similar overall shape, but we've got a very different footprint at different layout. So depending on how you lay out your bends, you're going to have a different flat pattern. Let's edit that convert to sheet metal feature again. And then I'm going to clear all of the bends and we'll add some more from the bottom there. So one thing to note is you do need to select the bends in order. So if I select this one on the bottom, then I can't select this one on the far edge because there is a bend in-between. It hasn't been selected yet. So we've got to select them in order like this. And then I can select this one at the top and maybe this one on the other end as well. So we ripped along the top there automatically. We can also add bent to these ones on the bottom. And then we're gonna rip along these other edges automatically. Then if I press OK, we've got that entire outer sheet and we can flatten that and have a look at the pattern. So this video is really just an introduction to the convert to sheet metal tool. We'll look at it in a bit more detail in the next video. So to recap, I'm gonna delete that convert to sheet metal feature. This is how we started just with a solid body. First you have to select the converter sheet metal tool. Then you need to select a fixed face and set the thickness and the bend radius. If those aren't available, you might need to press override default here. Then we can just select the edges we want to bend and the ripped edges should be found automatically. Remember that you can't select non-adjacent bends, so you gotta select them in order. And if you don't select any edges, then those faces will be removed from the model when you convert to sheet metal. So this tool is a really good way of taking a solid and converting it to sheet metal. In the next video, we'll dig into this in a bit more detail and have a look at some of those smaller options. 31. Convert to Sheet Metal - Advanced: In the previous video, we just looked at the basics of the converter sheet metal tool. And in this one we'll look at a few more of the detailed options. And we'll also talk about some considerations you might need when you're working with a tool like this. So firstly, let's edit that converts a sheet metal feature that we had in the previous video. And we'll have a look at those two initial options that we skipped over. The first one here at the top is called reverse thickness. And this simply just reverses the direction of the sheet. If you look closely at the preview, you can see as I click an unclick this, it changes the direction in the sheet. So the x0 is inside the shape here. If your press reverse that she is now outside the shape. If I press OK and then get the Measure tool, we can measure this outer distance and it's coming out as a 104 millimeters. Remember we said that shape as 100 millimeters and then we've got two millimeter sheet thickness. So that's a 104 overall than if I edit the feature and I reversed the thickness or turn off reversed thickness. And then we remeasure. This time we've got 100 because the entire sheet metal part is inside that initial shape. The second option, if we edit the feature again, is called keep body. And if you check this, it means when you convert a sheet metal, you'll also keep the initial body that you used for the conversion. So usually the body just disappears or is consumed by the feature. If you click this, then you can keep it. So you can use it again to make another part if you need to. So I'll show you how this works. If we press OK, we've now got the converted sheet and we've also got the initial body. If I hover over these and press tab going to hide the body. And then if I expand the cut list, here we have the body but is hidden. So I'm going to reshow that and then I'm gonna hide the sheet. So now I've just got the body and the sheet is hidden. So there might be occasions where you want to make to sheet metal parts from a single body. So for example, we've just made that bottom part. Now we can reuse that feature again. And we can make a top part like this. So you can set a different fixed face. Maybe just add one band here on the corner. Can now de-select keep body because we don't want to keep it a third time. And then when I press OK, we've now got to sheet metal parts. So we've got the top section and we've got the bottom section. We can see there clashing a bit here. So it might be worth going in and editing the first one. And this change in the thickness, reversing the thickness. And now it should be outside of that top part. So that's a good example of using reverse thickness as well. Another thing that we can do is add manual rip lines. So we're just gonna get back to a single part. I'm gonna delete that second part. Then I'm going to edit that first convert to sheet metal feature. I'm going to turn off the heat body just to avoid any confusion. And I'm gonna add bed lines everywhere we want them. So that's add one to this top edge as well. Automatically gonna rip along the other, in the other corner. So now we have the whole outer shape. When we press OK, it looks something like this. We are ripping on this right-hand edge. But imagine we say want to rip halfway along this face. So we can actually add in a manual rip line anywhere we want to do this, you've got to sketch the red before you do the convert to sheet metal feature. So I'm going to drag the robot bar up above the convert feature. So it's essentially turned off in the model and now we're adding features before. Then I'm going to start a sketch on this top face and just get a line tool, just gonna do a line straight across the two midpoints there. Now if we drag back down the converter sheet metal is turned on again. But we've got that sketch before. We can now edit that converts a sheet metal feature. We can go all the way down to rip sketches. And then we can choose that sketch. Then just add another band on the right-hand edge there. And then when I press OK, now we're ripping along the middle of that top face. And if we drag all the way down, we can now flatten this part. So it is possible to use your own rip sketches, but you just have to draw them before the converter sheet metal feature. Now before we finish this video, I just want to show you a potential issue that you can have working with this tool. So you really need to consider when you work you in sheet metal. So I'm going to edit our converter sheet metal feature. I'm going to remove all of the bands. Then I'm just going to add three on the bottom here. So that looks like it's worked fine. If we press OK, the feature seems to have been created. Okay. Some of the bend relief looks slightly strange, but all of the bends are there. But now if we press flatten, you see the part hasn't flattened. And here on the left we've got some kind of warning or error. It says this part contains features that cannot be unbent. So we've got a problem with one of our features somewhere. And if we expand this further, you can see we've got a problem with one of these flattened bends. One of the bands can't be flattened for some reason. The problem that's happening here is when these edges unbind, they're actually clashing with each other in a flat state. This is something that you can run into by accident if you're using the converts or sheet metal features like this. Let's go to a top view and we can sort of demonstrate what the problem is here. Let's draw some sketches on this face to visualize the edges that were trying to bend. So this edge is going to bend something roughly like this. This one's going to own band like this. So this is what a flattened sheet would look like. But then this third band in the middle, this one's going to unbind something roughly like this. So you can see straight away we're going to have a clash between these two edges here. Obviously, if we have a flat sheet, we can't have material from two flanges in the same place. So we wouldn't actually be able to make bends like this. It doesn't necessarily mean that this part is totally unmistakable. You just need to make it in a different way. So if you've created your parts using convert to sheet metal, you might need to just think about this kind of thing. Just because you can make it in SolidWorks doesn't mean that you can actually make it in real life. So it can help to unfold you parts every so often. Just check that everything is okay. If you do get an unfolding arrow like this, then try suppressing the features one by one and then flattening apart to try and narrow it down to where the problem might be. Or just look at the error messages underneath flat pattern. So in general, this tool is very useful. You can use it to convert solid parts to sheet metal parts. Firstly, select the fixed face and then add the bands and the rips. You can also draw your manual rips that make sure you draw the sketch before you make the converts a sheet metal feature. You can also use the key bodies option to make multiple sheets or parts from the same body. And you can reverse the thickness there if you need to. When you're using this tool converts a sheet metal, tried to be aware of any potential flattening issues like the one we just looked at. Often, if you give me apart a little bit of thought, you can get around any issues by making things in a slightly different way. In the next section, we're going to have a look at forming tools which allow you to press things like dimples, ribs, or small logos into your sheets. 32. Introduction to Forming Tools: We've now looked at how you can create sheet metal parts from scratch. How you can convert existing parts to sheet metal. And at most of the solid worksheet metal tools that you can use to build up your part. In this section, we're going to look at forming tools. And these are basically shaped tools or dies that are pressed into a metal sheet under high pressure. And they actually press their own shape into that sheet. Examples of these are things like dimples, small ribs, or maybe logos that are pushed into the sheet. You can also have forming tools that cut away the material as they form. And these might give shapes like handles or vents. Solid Works includes a number of pre-existing forming tools in the design library. They can use very quickly. But these are all very specific sizes. So I personally find it's quite unlikely that you'll use these directly as they are. But first, I'll just show you how to use the forming tools directly from the design library. And then in the next video, we'll have a look at how you can modify the size and shape of these tools for your own needs. And then in the video after that, we'll look at how you can actually make your own custom forming tools for US. One thing that you should know before we start using forming tools is that they are often custom tooling. So they often made specifically for your project. If you create your own forming tools, than it might drive up the cost and lead time of your projects by quite a bit. But it's always worth speaking to your manufacturer because maybe they've already got some existing forming tools from the previous project that you can use for a similar purpose. So let's get started with actually using the tools. I'm just going to start a new part. You can use the existing base flange part if you want. All I'm gonna do is create a simple base flange, just a flat sheet that's one millimeter thick. So I'm going to draw on the top plane. I'm going to draw a sensor rectangle and make it something like 180 by 120. Then I'm gonna go to sheet metal base flange. And I'm just gonna make it one millimeter thick. So we've just got a single flat sheet of metal to get to are forming tools. We have to open the design library tab. And this is over here on the right-hand side of the screen. It looks like a little set of books quickness icon. And you'll open this side panel. And you should see the design library here. If you don't see the design library there, like you don't see it on my screen, then you might just have to add it to your Solid Works. And it's a pretty straightforward process. So if you don't see it there, just go up to tools, go all the way down to the bottom, then choose options, then system options, and then choose file locations. Then for this dropdown that says show folders for, let's click that and let's choose design library. So you see here there's nothing under the design library. So we just need to add the folder where the design libraries actually stored on your computer. To actually add the design library folder, just press the add button, and then we need to find where the design library is on your computer. This is usually on your C drive under program data, under Solid Works. So have a look for that now together. So click the Add button, find your c drive. And then tried to find program data. It should be here just under program files. And if yours doesn't show up like this, then it might be because it's a hidden folder. By default there is a hidden folder. So you need to show this in your Windows Explorer first. To show this, just right-click on your Windows button at the bottom of your screen, and then press File Explorer. This should then open a Windows Explorer window. Here at the top click on view. And you only have to do this once. Once it's done, it will be remembered throughout your Solid Works. So just click on view and just made sure that hidden items are visible. So per checking this hidden items box here, now if you go back to solid works, back to that folder where we were looking for the program data. You might need to refresh. So just right-click in some empty space and press refresh. And now we can see the program data folder is that. So let's open that. Go all the way down to Solid Works. Choose your current version of Solid Works that you're working with. And then select design library. Then the select that folder and press OK to add it. So now here we are going to be adding C program data, SolidWorks, your version of Solid Works design library. The location might be slightly different on your computer, but it should be that design library folder. Press ok to add that folder. And you might get a few more pop-ups from Windows. If you do just press OK to those ones. Then when we go over to the design library, we should now see that design library folder here. If we expand this design library, you see there's loads of different subfolders. And one of them is the forming Tools folder. That's what we're going to use in this video. If you still can't find your design library or you can't see this forming Tools folder. It might be that it's not included in your install of Solid Works. And if so, this video and the next one after it, probably not that relevant to you by the one after that, creating custom forming tools might still be useful for you. So assuming you now have the design library and they're forming Tools folder there, let's select forming tools. And we've got a few sub options in here. If we select these folders, you can see we've got different tools within them that appear here. Now to use these tools is quite simple. All we need to do is just drag the tool onto the sheet where we want to use it. So let's open the embassies folder, for example. And let's drag one of these tools that say a circular and bus into the sheet. And we're just going to drag it onto the face where we want to add it. And you should get a preview of the tool. If not, if you get this message that says, are you trying to make a derived part? That's because we've just added that forming Tools folder and Solid Works doesn't recognize that it is the forming Tools folder at the moment. So if you do get this derived part message, just press cancel, then open the design library panel again. And you only have to do this once. So open the design library panel, then right-click on the folder called forming tools and just put a check here where it says forming Tools folder. So it says you've chosen some art this folder as the forming Tools folder. Do you want to include this folder and all of its subfolders? Risk gonna press yes. So now if we open the folder again, that's open and bosses again. And let's try and drag a circular in Boston. Now you should get correct preview Like this. And now that we've set up that forming Tools folder and the design library, that should all be done. So usually it should be a little bit easier than this. You just open the design library tab and then dragging the tool that you want. So you see here we have a preview. And then here on the left, this is the face where we're going to insert the tool. You can display this and get a new one if you want. We can also change the rotation angle. That won't change in this tool because it's a circular tool. You can flip the face that the tools going in front. And then there are some more options down here. This one in particular, link to form tool. This will means that if we later on or just the forming tool model, which is a separate part in SolidWorks, then all of the form features made without tool will update too. But you might want to completely break that link between the forming tool and the forum feature. And if you want to do that, you can uncheck this box. Then there are just some flat part and options down here. Now before we press OK. Let's go to the position stamp. This is quite similar to the whole visit. So we've got the type tab and we've also got the position stamp. We can now set the exact position using smart dimensions. And anywhere that we place a point, we'll add a new form using this forming tool. So I'm just going to place a few more points and we can put these in position using the Smart Dimension. I'm just gonna roughly put them in place for now. And then I'm going to press OK. And now those dimples are added. You can see it's a dimpled that goes through from one side and it sticks out the other side. Here on the left we've got the formed feature. We can edit that as usual just by clicking it and pressing edit feature. And then we can change all these parameters. We can also expand the feature and we can edit that sketch with the points in if we want to change the position or add new forms. And then this sketch is just the actual sketch of the forming tool itself. As I mentioned briefly earlier, you can also make cuts with these forming tools. So if we open the design library again, look at these different form tools. The ones with the red face actually make a cup. So a yellow face will bend the material and a red face will cut the material. So I'm going to go back to in bosses. I'm gonna get this counter sinking boss. And I'm gonna try that one, just going to drag it into the model, place it on the face where we want to make the feature. And we're going to add a few more on the positions tab and then press OK. So now we've made that simple, but we've also got that car out in the middle. And this might be useful for counter sinking screws or something like that. So this was an introduction of how to actually use the preexisting forming tools to recap them. These are dies or shapes that are pressed into a cheat to bend or cut it. You can use the existing forming tools in the Solid Works design library just by dragging them into your model. Then you can edit the positioning as required. If you don't see the design library, you might just have to add it to your file locations by going to Tools, system options, fire locations, and then finding the design library folder, which is on your computer. In the next video, we'll have a look at actually editing these tools. So they're a bit more useful for your own requirements. 33. Editing Forming Tools: In the previous video, we introduced forming tools and we showed some of the standard tools that are available in the Solid Works design library, just a standard. However, we also mentioned that it's quite unlikely that you'll want to use these exact tools because there isn't really a large selection of sizes that you've got with the toolbox parts. But there is a fairly decent set of overall actual different types of parts. So it might be possible for you to take an existing forming tool and then this change the size or the shape a little bit. In the next video, we'll have a look at making your own custom tools. But in this one, we'll just have a look at modifying what we've already got there. This was how we left our part. So let's say we want to add a rectangular flange. We could just open the design library, open the forming Tools folder, find the tool that we want, and then drag it into the part and then place it where we want. And then that rectangular flange is added. But the chances of us wanting to use a flange that is exactly this size are pretty low rarely. But there is a fairly high chance that we do want a rectangular flange, but we just want to set our own size so we can actually change their shape and then use that tool again. And the first stage of this is just to find an existing tool that you want to modify. So in this example, we know that we want to use a rectangular flange. So we can use this same tool and just modify it. Open the design library sidebar again, then find the tool that you want to modify. So in this case it's the rectangular flange. And then right-click on the tool and press open. And this will actually open apart for the tool. So you can see in this case it's quite simple part really is just a solid body with some Phillips essentially. To change the size and shape of that. Or we need to do is just click on the part. And we can see that it's made up of these underlying dimensions. So it's 20 wide, it's 30 though. So we can just double-click on those dimensions and change them. So I'm gonna make it maybe 50 of them and then make it a bit thinner, so maybe ten wide. And if it doesn't update right away, you can just rebuild by pressing the rebuild icon appear or by pressing control B. And now we can see the tool is a lot thinner and longer. But you might have noticed that around this edge, now this fill, it doesn't seem to being created properly. We've lost them in the filler that goes all the way around. And if we drag back through the model, we can see what the problem is. So let's go all the way back to the start of the model. So we started off with this base feature. Then we added the top section that we actually wanted to cut out. Then we fill it at the four corners and then we fill it all the way round. But because the base section is now the exact same size as the top section. Second fill it doesn't go all the way round. So we just need to increase the size of the base. So I increase the top of the tool by 20 millimeters length. I'm gonna also increase the base by the same amount. So I'm just going to click on that base feature and then double-click on the number, the 50 millimeters here. Just going to change it from 50 to 70, just so we're keeping a base that's a little bit larger than the top feature all the way round. And now if we rebuild that second, Philip has gone all the way around. So that base feature is really just there. So we can get that, fill it all the way round. In the next step, that base is actually completely cut off, but we've still got that rounded edge of the Phillip. And we kind of need that rounded edge because if you imagine this area is actually bending the metal. So if we have a really sharp edge that it might cause issues, maybe tearing or crinkling the material. And it's also just much easier to machine this rounded edge on the forming tool itself. Now we've made all the changes we want the forming tool. So let's save this part as a new part. And we can do this by going to Save As this means that we're going to keep the old part as well. And so if we have any other parts or features that are made using the old forming tool, then they won't be affected by this new change because it's going to be an entirely new part. So I'm going to go to File Save As now we're still in the forming Tools folder. And it's usually easier to save into this folder. Because then SolidWorks will usually recognize this part as forming tool straightaway. So I am going to call our new tool rectangular flange long. I've already used this name before. So when I press okay, gives me a warning, just going to press OK, and I'm gonna resave that. And now if we open the design library again and we open that extruded flange folder. You should see your new tool is in there. If you don't see it there, maybe if you saved it in a different folder, then the tool might not appear there. And if so, just click this button at the top, add to library, and then go and find your part and then choose the folder you want to save it in, and then press OK. Now if we go back to our sheep part, it can switch documents by pressing control and tap. So you can see that original flange cutout is still the same because we haven't actually changed the original part, because we saved the new flange, has a new part. But now we can open the design library and we can actually drag in that new forming tool. So you can see there that the flange is the same sort of shape, but a little bit longer and thinner. If we wanted to, we could edit the feature, we could change the angle, change the position, and so on. And that's how you modify forming tools. So to recap, modifying forming tools is fairly straightforward and it's a bit of a quicker way than making a custom tool. I'd recommend that first you find a tool that's similar to what you want to use. Then right-click on the tool in the design library and open it, and then make your changes. Then save the part as a new file so you can still use the old one and you won't change any old features made using that original tool. If you save it in the same forming Tools folder than it should be added to the library. If not, you can also add it manually by pressing that add to library button. Then you can use that forming tool just like any of the others. And if you have any issues or errors when you using your new tool, then just double check that all of you Phillips look okay, and you might need to increase the size of your base feature just so you don't have any issues with Philips there. In the next video, we'll have a look at making entirely custom forming tools. 34. Custom Forming Tools: As we mentioned in the previous videos, SolidWorks does have a range of pre-made forming tools. But the chances are that at some point in the future, you'll want to use a custom forming tool. This could be something functional for your design or it could just be something like a logo. In this video, we'll have a look at how you can create your own custom forming tools and then use them in your design. Before we start, let's just delete all of these extra forms on the base flange from the previous video. Just so we've got a nice empty base flange there that we can use for our forming tool once we've made it. Now let's open up one of the pre-made forming tools in solid works so we can have a look at how the tool is actually made. So open the design library. And if you don't have the design library or these tools, then you can just watch along at this section because we'll make our own in a moment. So I'm going to open the design library. Go to forming tools, go to something like in bosses and open this counter sinking boss tool. I'm going to click on it and press open. This is the part that makes up the counter sinking boss tool. And one of the first things that you might notice is the colors in a farming tool. These red faces show the faces to remove, so those that cut material away. And then the yellow faces are faces that will actually deform or bend the material. Let's have a look at creating our own forming tool. But one thing that you should bear in mind when making these tools is that they can be quite expensive to actually custom make in real life. And they probably will add some extra lead time onto your parts, so you parts will take longer to be made. The first thing that we need to do is start a new part. So let's go to File New and then just start a new part. And we need to sketch a base that's larger than the tool and extrude it to say ten millimeters. We're going to delete this base later. So don't worry too much about the size. It just helps us set up the tool correctly. Let's start on the front plane, but it could be any plane and draw a center rectangle, say 200 by 200. And as I mentioned, this size isn't really too important because it will be cut away. It's just to help us initially make the tool. So when you've drawn the rectangle, let's extrude that blind ten millimeters. Now that we've created and extreme database, we can actually make the forming tool geometry. This is the part that will actually press the shape into the sheets. I'm going to draw something like a large Plus or cross shape. And so I'm going to use to censor rectangles for this. I'm going to start a sketch on this top face, center rectangle and then draw one at the origin like this. And then another one, also the origin. But in this direction, I am going to make them both the same size, let's say 20 wide by 100 long. And then I can use relations. So I'm gonna select both of these shortages and make them equal. And then do the same on these long edges. So hold down control, select both along edges and then make those equal. Now we've got the profile that we can use to make the extruded section. So I'm just going to extrude this, that because we've got these overlapping lines, we might get an error. So let's just go to the Features tab, press Boss Extrude, and then go down to selected contours, just gonna select both of the rectangles so we can extrude everything, even though we've got these overlapping lines here. Going to do a blind extrude ten millimeters, but you can set whatever size you want. So now we have the actual cross-shaped that we're going to press into the metal. If you look at it. Very sharp edges. And forming tools and sheet metal in general really doesn't really like sharp edges because these can cause problems. They can cut the material, they can cause crinkles, things like that. So ideally we need to round off the sharp edges with Phillips. So for example, let's select the Philip tool and then round off all of these small edges. We're going to try maybe five millimeters for those. We also want to round off this top edge. So I'm gonna do maybe two millimeters around there. And then finally this bottom edge as well. And this was why we added the base. It just helps us to add this fill at round the button. We could do it without the base, but would probably have to draw the profile and then sweep it around. Then it would just be a lot easier to use the base like this. So let's get the Philip tool and this time let's go for four millimeters. Now tools nearly ready so we can cut away the base because we don't need anymore. Let's expand that base feature. So let the sketch used to make it and then do an extruded Kurt using that initial sketch. So this will be the same as the boss, so ten millimeters in this case, and that was cuts away that base. But we've still got that fill at around the bottom edge. At this stage, we can also add an orientation sketch. This can be used to position the tool and it can be used in the flat pan view of the part. If we make a 2D drawing. To make this sketch, let's just start sketch on the bottom of the tool. So underneath here, select the entire face and then press Convert. And that will add the entire outer perimeter of that tool as new sketch entities. Then I'm also just gonna get the point tool and add a point at the center of the tool, just help us position at. Now our tool is ready to be made into a forming tool so we can exit the sketch to make it into the tool. We can go to Insert sheet metal forming tool. Here on the left, we have to choose some options. And the first one is the stopping face. This is the face that stops at the face of your sheet metal part. So it's the face that's flush with your metal sheet when the forming tools at its deepest point. In this case, we're going to press the entire tool all the way into the metal. So this back face should be in line with the sheet. So this back face is the stopping face. And if this is a little bit unclear at the amendment, then we'll have a look in a bit more detail when we actually test out the finished tool. And it will be a bit more obvious then. But for now we can just select this back face. Next day's faces to remove. These are any faces that will be cut away by the tool. Now you don't have to choose anything here. Any faces that you do will be cut out of the metal. So I'm gonna choose this inside cross face here. And then finally we need the insertion point. I'm not sure why these are on two different tabs, but like this tab. And then just set the insertion point. This is the point we will use for Ashley dimensioning and positioning the tool. So usually it's good to keep this at the center of the tool, at the origin here. So then press OK to make the tool, we can see we've got this form tool feature in the design tree. And we can see that the colors have changed. So any red faces will be removed from the sheet, lays on. The yellow faces will be bent. And then this cyan color on the back, sort of a greenish blue color, is the stopping face. Now we can save the part and we've got a couple of options. We can either just save it as a normal part and we can save it in our forming Tools folder. This part will then show up in the design library. And if it's in that forming soul folder, it will be recognized as a forming tool even though it is just a normal part file if we save it elsewhere. So in another folder somewhere else, then SolidWorks will just see it as a normal part file. But you can't actually say that as a specific forming toolbar. And then SolidWorks will recognize it as a forming tool no matter where it is saved. So let's go to File Save As. So we can either save it just as a normal part file, but in the forming Tools folder and it will be recognized. So let's call it something like cross tool. Or if we want to save it elsewhere, we can click Save As type here. And then we can choose form tool here is dot SSLD dot FTP. If we choose this option, then no matter where we say that SolidWorks will always see those are forming tool. So I'm just gonna say that as a normal part, but in the forming Tools folder under the embarrasses subfolder here for a safe. Now if we open the design library and we go in the Abbasids folder, we can see we've got that cross tool there. And we can just use this like a normal forming tool now. So now to test this out, let's go back to our original sheet, which was this one. Let's open the design library and we can just drag that cross tool onto the sheet. And then we can use the tool like any other forming tool. Press OK to add that feature. Now we can see that all the faces that yellow on the forming tool are bent or the ones that are red are cuts away. And then that cyan face, the stopping face is inline with the top of the sheet. Just one final thing that we can show. If we go back to the tool, we can actually split up the calving face, so we just cut out certain sections of that face. So I'm going to drag backup of the form tool feature to turn off. And then I'm going to draw something up here, just a simple sketch, maybe like a smiley face. And then I'm gonna use the split line command, which can be found if you search under the commands up here, start to type splits, find split line. Let's select the projection option. Select that smiley face sketch, and then choose the face that we wants a splits. Now we've split that face up into four sub faces. So they're all still exactly lined up, but they are four separate faces. Now we can drag back down to the form tool. We can edit that form tool and we can adjust the cutting face. So maybe we can just count out the smiley face sections, then save the tool and go back to the sheet. You may see initially that nothing has changed. If so, you can just edit the form tool feature and then press OK. Again, and those changes should pull threat. But at this stage, if we uncheck this box that says link to form tool, then we wouldn't have any changes now because this form tool feature would be entirely separate. It wouldn't be linked to that updated tool that we just changed. So this was an introduction to creating custom forming tools. These are just created as normal solid parts. Makes sure that the edges around off and it can help you to create a base first and then cutaway that later. When you've made your tool go to Insert sheet metal forming tools. Then select the stopping face and any face is to remove if needed. And also select the insertion point. Then you can save your part either just as a normal part file in the forming Tools folder or as a form tool part in any location. And then you can just use the form tool or any other tool. If you do have any issues with your forming tool, then just check that the radii, the Phillips on the tool onto type. And also be aware that custom form tools can be very expensive in real life. So this is the end of the forming tool section. In the next section, we'll put a load of these techniques and features together and we'll make a multibody enclosure as an example of what you can do with sheet metal. And then after that we'll have a look at 2D drawings and exporting your files for use. 35. Practical Example - Creating the Enclosure Base and Walls: Now that we've covered most of the sheet metal techniques, we can put them together to make an example par. We're going to create something like a small sheet metal rack, maybe something like you'd see in a server farm. And we'll make it as a single part, but with multiple bodies. And we'll talk a little bit more about it as we go through. Let's start new part and start sketch on the top plane. And then sketch a base using the centered rectangle. By starting at the origin. Like this allows us to keep the front and the right place at the center of the model. And this can really help with things like mating with other parts and assemblies and also with using features like mirrors. Let's make this rectangle 500 by 300. But you can choose any size you want. This is just an example. And then go to the sheet metal tab. And let's choose the base flange feature to make the first sheet metal feature. In the options here I'm gonna go for one millimeter thickness, but again, you can adjust it to whatever you want. You don't have to copy along exactly. I'm going to keep the bend allowance as a K factor of 0.05. and the auto relief as a standard. And then I'm going to press OK and that base flange feature is made. At this stage, I'm just gonna save the part is a good habit to get into regularly saving because SolidWorks does sometimes crash. And I'm just going to call it something like enclosure in progress. Now let's start to add some walls and we could use Edge phalanges for this. But in this case I'm gonna use a miter flange because it allows us to create a folder over at the top. And it also allows us to quickly make all of the edges at once. I'm going to zoom in and select the smaller end face and draw a sketch for the flange. I'm gonna do something like this. So I'm just gonna get the line tool, draw a single vertical line and then a little folded in section, and then just a small section that hangs down for the sizes. I'm gonna make it 50 millimeters high. Gonna make this intersection ten millimeters. Then this little lip is going to be five millimeters. So we've selected the end face, we've drawn a sketch, added some dimensions, and now we're going to use this to create a miter flange. Go to the sheet metal tab and choose might've lunch. And we should automatically get a preview because we're already in the sketch. So we've got that profile already selected. Then let's just select these remaining three more edges. And we can see on the preview we've got a nice knighted corner there where the corners join. We can change the gap distance if we want to. We could also change the flange position and offset the start and end points if we need to. But I'm just going to keep everything default as it is and press ok to make that feature. And then our walls are all added in a single feature. So we've almost got the makings of an enclosure and we've only really got two features, the base flange and the might've lunch. Now actually making these folded over my C-sections in real life could be a little bit tricky because it's quite tight corner in there, but it should be possible. So this is more just about showing you the actual technique in solid works rather than really talking about the best manufacturing techniques. So all we've done so far is create a base flange. And then we've added the second feature that might've flange for the walls. In the next video, we'll expand on this a little bit more and add some more cutouts and details. 36. Enclosure - Adding Details: In the previous video, we started our foreign closure by making the base and adding some walls using a might've flange. And in this video we're going to expand on that and add some more details with cutouts or the front. Firstly, let's add some holes at the front. These could be for cables or something like that. And there's a few ways that we could add dates. We could use the whole visit, simple hold option or just an extruded cut. For the simple hole. You can see we don't really have much control over this. We can just change the diameter, but we can't really change the position without going in and editing the sketch. So personally, I prefer to just use the whole wizard or maybe even just draw sketch. And I mentioned that and then use an extruded cut. In this case because we want round holes, are going to use the whole Was it. So I'm going to select the whole wizard, which is on the Features tab. Just gonna choose a simple hole and then set it as a dowel, whole ten millimeters diameter. But you can set whatever size you want. I'm gonna go to the positions tab and I'm going to position the first one on this front face here. And to help position it, I'm gonna use a center line so we can figure out the exact halfway point of that front face. So I'm going to select the center line, go Normal to and then just start from the midpoint. And this left-hand edge go all the way over to the right-hand edge and then finish on the midpoint here. So now we've got a line that's halfway up that front face. And we can use that to line up the whole in terms of the distance. I'm gonna make it 20 millimeters from the edge. And when you're adding holes and cut outs near the edge, try not summit in too close to the bends or to the edge of the material. Because some manufacturers might have limits on how close you can go to the edge, alter the bends, but it's always worth checking with your own manufacturer. Then I'm just going to add a second hole here. And I'm gonna make this 120 from the first talk. So in terms of your dimensioning, it really depends what you're trying to achieve. You might want to have it. So these holes are always 20 millimeters apart. So if this first one changes, the second one changes with it. But you might want to have it. So the second hole is always 40 millimeters from the left. And in that case, it might be better if you just I mentioned that whole directly from the left. So if the first hole changes, the second hole won't change. So it really depends what you want to achieve in your design. When you're happy with those two holes press OK, and now those cuts are added. But now if we look in 3D, we can see the cuts have gone all the way through the model. We've got the front and the back. And actually you're just wanting to cut the front. So let's go in and edit that hole. Was it feature? And let's just change it from through all cat to maybe something like a blind, say ten millimeters. So it just goes through the front there. Now we've added the two holes. Next up, let's add something like maybe a cut out for some ports, maybe USB port or something like that. To do this, let's start sketch on this front face. Firstly, I'm going to add some construction lines so we can always make sure that these two initial holes are lined up with this poor. So I'm gonna get a central line or construction line. And I'm going to draw a line between the two center points of these holes. If you hover over the outside circular edge, you can get the center point. So I'm going to draw a line like this. Then I'm going to draw another line from the center of that line all the way down to the bottom. And now we can use this second construction line to line up our cups. So can use a sensor rectangle, starts it from the midpoint of that second line. And then to set some dimensions. I can also round off the corners here using the sketch Philip, and then select all. And if that looks good, you can go to the sheet metal tab and press extruded cut. And I'm going to link to thickness. So it just cuts through that front sheets. So now I've made that initial cap. And no matter where those circles move, that poor coat will also move. And I'm just going to rename it as something like port cut. If you work in with something like a PCB printed circuit board, then it can be really helpful to make a simple assembly, PUT your basic She enclosure into it, and then also add your PCB model. And then you can edit your enclosure part within the assembly. And that allows you to actually line up the cutouts on the enclosure with any features on the PCB. And you can also link them together. So it means if you're bored model changes, then the ports will move automatically. So now we have our two holes for the cables and holes for the ports. And if we've just got one set of cables and ports, and this could be fine. But maybe we've got another one on the other side. So we can actually select those features, hold down control, and also selects one in the middle planes. And then we can use mirror, which is on the Features tab. And we can add those curves onto the opposite side as well. So this is a good reason to use something like a sensor rectangle when you start, because you've always got those base planes and the middle of your model and they're really easy to use for mirroring. Imagine if we needed a lot more than this, instead of just the two sets, we could then delete the mirror feature. And we could use something like a linear pattern instead. So could select the port cuts and the holes and then go to the Features tab linear pattern. Now we need to select the pattern direction. So I can select any of these straight lines. And then the patents spacing. Let's try something like 40 millimeters. And then the instance is, it looks like there's too many there now. So let's just drop it down. And it looks like seven fifths in pretty well. Then when we press OK, we've got those cutouts all the way along the front. Just one thing, if we look at them from the front, we can see they're not quite even. So maybe we can go back in and we can edit the pattern spacing slightly to even them out a little bit. You can also use the measure tool to really accurately check whether you've got this spacing correct stage. We can also just flatten apart to check everything looks okay. So we can see we've got those Ben lines for that folded over section at the top of the edges. We've got all the cows at the front. So in this video we've started to add a bit more detail to the model. And so make those cutouts at the front there just make the enclosure Little bit more functional. Often you'll find in sheet metal that European in the same sort of cuts and features. So things like the patterning and the mirror features become really useful and great time savers. In the next video, we will add a led to this model. 37. Enclosure Lid: Over the course of the previous few videos, we've made the base of our simple enclosure. We've added some walls and we made these cutouts along the front. And in this one we're going to make a lead. And so we're gonna make this part into a multibody part. To actually model the lead, we're going to create another base flange. And we want this to be on top of the current walls and we want it to match the size of the current bottom part. Let's zoom in and select one of these small faces and then start a sketch. And then from here we can go to a normal to view. And we can sketch a rectangle that's linked to the size of the bottom parts. So let's select the Rectangle tool, the Corner Rectangle. But then if we zoom in, we can see we don't actually have a sharp corner there because of the gap between the edges. So what we're gonna do is draw a rectangle in roughly the correct position like this. And then zoom out and do the same in this corner. And then we're going to link it manually. To do this, I'm going to zoom in. And this sketch is still undefined, it's still blue so we can still move the rectangle around. And what we're gonna do is select one of the outer edges of the existing enclosure, hold down Control. And then select the corresponding edge of the rectangle. And then from the menu that pops up that choose a co linear relation. This now means that the rectangle and the base flange follow the exact same line. Then we can do the same process for the other three edges. So, so let the edge of the existing base Blanche hold down Control and then select the rectangular line and then press co-linear. Then I'm going to do the same on the opposite corner here with these two lines. Remember you can select multiple items by holding down Control. So I'm selecting the edge here holding down Control and then also selecting the rectangle. Now this takes a little bit longer, but it means that now this lids sketch is linked to the bottom part. So if we increase the size of that bottom part, then the size of the lead feature will also increase by the correct amount when your sketches fully defined. So when all of the lines are black, we can now go to the sheet metal tab and we can use this rectangle to create a new base flange. Select baselines. And then there's two things that we should check before we press OK. Firstly, we need to undertake this merge result bucks. This means that this new base flange won't be merged into the existing part that we've made that base part. So uncheck that. And then also zoom in and you might need to reverse the direction. We can see in this case that the new flange is going to clash with the existing edges. So if I press reverse direction, there's no longer a clash there. So you need to uncheck Merge result and you might also need to press reverse direction. That looks good. Press OK, and that new base flange is created. And I'm going to rename that feature as lead. Now if we look in the design tray up here where it says catalyst, you should have a small two in brackets next to the cut list. And that's because we now have two different sheets in the model. If we expand this, you can see the first sheet is this bottom part with the walls and the original base. And then the second she is the lead. So now we do have a lead, but it's basically just one single flat sheets, so it's not really ideal. It would probably be really flexible in bendy and it's quite hard to join to the bottom part. So it probably just slide off with the slightest of movement. So we're going to add some small edge flanges to help with these issues. Select the Edge lunch tool. Then let's zoom in and let's just select this small front edge. Then we can also select the two side edges as well. You might need to click in the edge flange box again up here at the top. So we should have the front edge and the two side edges that set the angle is 90 and the flange length as ten millimeters. And then for the flange position, let's go with this second one, material outside. So if we look from the front, we can see that the material or the bend is outside the flange, so it doesn't clash with that bottom part, although it is touching it exactly. That might causes another issue, but we'll deal with that in a moment. We can also set the gap between the different edge funders. By default, this is one millimeter, so I'm just going to stick with that. And then I'm going to press OK to make those edge phalanges. So the front and the sides are looking good. If we look at the back here, you can see there's no flange along the back. Maybe we could have something like a piano hinge, which is a small range that runs the entire length of the sheet. We weren't add that end, but we'll just round off the sharp corners of the back using a break corners option. So I'm going to go to the corners Tools, choose Break corner, gonna choose around corner, and seven millimeters. And then just zoom in and select those small edges on both sides on the back. We don't want to select the entire face because we only want to round off these back edges. And you could also use a Philip for this. It would give you the same end result. So now our enclosures not looking too bad. It's looking a bit more like an enclosure with this lead. But there's a few things and not quite happy with. Firstly, as we mentioned earlier, there's no gap between the LED and the base. We ideally need a bit of space between these flanges so they're not too tight and so they can even fit together out. Whenever you make parts in SolidWorks, they're never going to be the exact size that you draw them in. Solidworks are always going to be slightly bigger or slightly smaller. This is the same when you're making anything at all. And this slight difference is what we call tolerance. Depending on how your parts are made, this tolerance will be different. So if you've got a cheap manufacturer or part where sizes and that critical, then the parts might be made to plus or minus one millimeter for example. So this means if we've got apart that's ten millimeters wide, it will actually be made somewhere between nine millimeters and 11 millimeters in size. If you're making something really accurate, then you can pay more for your manufacturing. And you parts might be plus or minus 0.1 millimeters. So then your ten millimeter part might actually be somewhere between 9.910.1. And this all really depends on how much you're willing to pay. If you want a smaller tolerance, then you have to pay more for your manufacturing. But the point is that there will always be some inaccuracy in there, even if it's really small. So if you make parts that fit together exactly in solid works, then you might have problems. Because for example, the bass part might be made slightly too large and the lead part might be made slightly too small so they won't fit together. So the point is that there should always be a small gap in there to help them fit together unless you actually want an extremely tight push fit. So all of that was a bit of a long winded way of saying that basically we need to add a gap in there. To do this, let's just edit that edge flange feature. And then we can set the offset down here. I'm going to choose the offset box. We can see that ten millimeters is way too large. So let's drop that down to 0.2 millimeters. And you can see we've got this small gap on the sides and the front. So looking at the ages, this is a bit better, but it's still not ideal because there's a bit of a sharp edge on there. It might be uncomfortable to use and it could just look a little bit better. So let's improve this with a folded over edge. And we can add this using the hem feature. Select him and we want to choose a basic closed him, which is this first option. Then let's set five millimeters and then select those inside edges. Oops, so not this one. Let's clear that selection and then choose the inside edges. And that should be on the sides and the front. And as we're adding these, you might see a problem, but we're just going to press OK and at that Ham feature anyway. And now we can see that the folded area of the ham is actually clashing with the bottom part of our enclosure. So what we need to do is just offset our edge flange a little bit more. So I'm going to edit the edge flange feature again. And we're going to increase that offset. So our offset was 0.2 millimeters. We've just added a one millimeter him with a nought 0.1 millimeter gap. So let's increase that offset to 1.3 millimeters. So it's the thickness of the material plus the gap in the ham feature. And if we add that, we can now see that we maintain that gap between the sides and the LED. So we've improved the gap with him. But now we can see we've got another issue because these hymns are clashing in the corner. And I just wanted to demonstrate that sometimes when you solve one problem, it can cause you other problems. To fix this clash, Let's just edit that edge flange feature again and just increase the gap distance slightly. So it was one millimeter. Let's change it to two millimeters. And that moves the corners away from each other and solve that issue. So now we've got these nice folded over corners around the front and the back. And we've got a small gap all the way round. Now we're almost done with this video. But one final thing I want to demonstrate is flattening multibody parts. You can only flatten one sheet at a time. And if you expand the flat patent feature at the bottom of the design tree here, he now see we've got these two flat pattern sub features. So we can just select these one at a time and press flatten or unsurprised to feature. One of these is the base and warnings that led. So I'm going to select this one and uncompress it. We can see that's the base there. So the base pi is flattened. If we tried to and suppress the second one, we can't unsee oppress them both at the same time. So first we have to suppress this first one again, and then we can suppress the other one. So there you see the lead part is now flattened. So it's only possible to flatten one sheet at a time in a multi-site part. So to recap this video, we added another sheet which was the lead. And for this we drew a sketch. We use the base flange again. We uncheck that merge result box. So we made an entirely new sheet. This then gave us another sheet in the cutlass folder. Then we added edge flanges all the way around. And we made sure that we had a small gap or clearance between the parts to account for the manufacturing tolerances. We also added a hymn to the flanges to make them a bit better looking at a bit more comfortable to use. And then we just did the band gap, just avoid the hems clashing in the corners. In the next video, we'll finish off this enclosure by adding some events and some formed features. 38. Enclosure - Adding Vents and More Details: Over the course of the previous few videos, we've created most of our enclosure, the bass and the lit, and some extra details. In this final one, we're going to finish off the enclosure by adding some vents to the back. And then also a couple of formed handles to the front using forming tools. First, let's do the events. You can cut these manually, but it's pretty easy to use Event tool instead. And you might remember from that vent tool video that the first thing that we need to do is draw sketch that the event will be based on. So I'm going to spin the model around and start a sketch on this back face. I'm going to go Normal to and then just get a sense of line. And I'm gonna make a line all the way across the middle. So you've got somewhere where we can line up the event. I'm going to zoom in and start from the midpoint of this left-hand edge. And go all the way up to the right and finish at the midpoint of the right hand side. And if we measure this, we can see it's roughly 300 millimeters. We're going to set the events 50 millimeters apart, but we only need to draw one sketch and then we can pad to the others. So I am going to draw a circle that's 35 millimeters diameter. And then if we measure from the midpoint, a 150 takes us right to the edge of the enclosure here. So let's drop that down to 100 and use that as the spacing for our events. Next, I'm going to offset this outer circle by five millimeters inwards to make the inner circles for the spars. And then I'm going to offset that in a circle, five millimeters inwards as well. And then finally are the vertical red just using the line tool. And then I'm going to pass in that round using a circular sketch pattern. You might have to clear the center of the pattern here on the left, and then select the center of that smaller circle. And I'm just going to be instances to five just to switch up the look of it a little bit. Now we have our base sketch for the vent feature, and we can choose the vent feature from the sheet metal tap. Then we can just go through bit by bit and choose all the different sections that we need. First one is the boundary, and let's choose this large outer circle. Next up is the ribs. And I'm going to select those five straight lines. So those are added to the vent. So let's set a size here and we're going to try 1.5 millimeters. Then next I'm going to select the SPARS, can also make those 1.5. Just gonna select this middle circle. And then finally for the filling area, I'm going to select this inner circle. And then finally, I'm just going to round off those sharp corners inside by adding, say, a one millimeter radius. So it's nice rounded corners in there. Then press OK. And this event is added to the model. Now we can just use a linear sketch pattern to pattern this along. So I'm gonna select the vent feature, Go to the Features tab and press linear pattern. And then first need to select the direction. So can select any of these straight edges along here. Then for the size they're way too close together, so that's up to 50. And now we can see we've got too many instances there. So I'm going to drop it down. And five of them fit in really well. They're nice and symmetrical. So I'm going to press OK. And those vent features are now added. So we've got all our ventilation on the back there. Now the last thing we're going to do is use a forming tool to add some small handles to the front so that this rack can be pulled out easily. Let's have a look in the design library and see what we can use. So I'm going to open forming tools. And if you look here under lovers, then we could use something like this. So you can use this for ventilation if you had a whole row of them, but you can also double it up as a handle to see if this would work. I'm just going to drag it into the model. We're gonna place it roughly about here. And if we zoom in, we can see first we need to flip the direction. So compress flipped tool. And that's looking pretty good actually, that might work pretty well as a handle. Now we can exactly adjusts the position by going to the position SAP. And then we can just use them smart dimensions to line it up so it's not crashing on the bottom. And that is not too close to the corner. It might be a little too close to the circular cutouts, but we can also move those in further if we need to. If that looks good, you can press OK. So we've added that one handle, and this is just something you can grab the pull out the tray. But ideally we want one on each side. So let's select that feature and also select the right plane, and then go to the Features tab and press mirror. So we've added a handle on to this side as well. So now I've got these two handles. You can see we could grab them one with each hand and we can pull out this entire tray. So to quickly recap this entire video, we've got a nice bit events relation on the back. We added those vents on the back by drawing a basic sketch with circles for the sparse and lines for the ribs. And then we use that with event feature. We also pattern events along, so we've got more of them. Then on the front we added these handles by dragging the appropriate forming tool into the model from the design library. And then just positioning it as needed, flipping it if needed, and then mirroring the forum feature over to the other side. So we have two of them. As we mentioned briefly, these cutouts might be a little bit too close to the handles, but maybe you could adjust those after speaking to our manufacturer. So there we have a fairly basic enclosure, but one that shows off some of the features that we've learned throughout the course. In the next section, we're gonna look at making a 2D drawing of this model. And we're gonna look at some things that are particular to sheet metal drawings. We're also going to learn how you could use these models to create manufacturing files for real-life manufacturing. 39. 2D Sheet Metal Drawings - Basics: If you've got this far in the course, then you're probably pretty competent SolidWorks use already, and you probably already know how to make 2D drawings. But there are just a few little extra details when making sheet metal drawings. So we're just going to have a quick run-through of making a drawing of that enclosure that we just modeled in the last section. The easiest way to make a drawing of your part. Open the part or assembly, and then go to file make drawing from or make assembly from part. The initial process is exactly the same as making a normal 2D drawing. So first we will choose a sheet size. You can either set your own or just use a standard one. I'm just going to use a standard one in this case just for the example. And now we can drag the views that we want from the view panel into the sheet. There's many different ways you can lay out your parts depending exactly on what standard urine. For now I'm just going to add some enlight the back here. And then I'm going to add these extra views as well. And for clarity, maybe just add an isometric 3D view. Just going to space those out a little bit for the isometric one up in the corner. And then we could also add an exploded view just to clearly show that we've got two different sheets here. To do this. First, go back to your part. So I'm gonna press control tab to go back to the part. And then to make an exploded view. Usually we do this in an assembly. So we do it from the assembly tap, but obviously we're not in an assembly now, so we don't have the Assembly tab, but we can still do an exploded view from within a power. Go to the search box here in the top right. Click on the drop-down and then make sure you're on commands. And then click in the box and just start to type exploded. And we see exploded view should appear. You can click on that to open the tool. And now it's a very similar process to making an exploded view in an assembly. Let's just choose the first body, the only body we're gonna move the lead and then just drag that up a little bit. And that's all we really need to do. So that's press OK. And as usual, the exploded views can be found under configuration tab. So if we expand this configuration, there's the exploded view. We can double-click on it to expand or collapse it. Now for use Control tab to go back to our drawing, the sheet should update but nothing looks like it's changed at the moment. If we now click on the isometric view or any of the views here on the left we have this option Show unexploded state. So I am just going to check that box. And now we can see we've got that exploded view in the graphics area. You might also just now when I copy and paste this isometric view, press control C to copy and then control V to paste. And then we can paste another one, and then we can select that one. And we can make that one into a collapsed state. So we've got the collapsed and they exploded state there. At this stage, we could maybe add some top-level dimensions. So we could go to the annotations Tab, get a smart dimension. And we could just add some things like the length and the width, can be a bit hard to choose these lines. Sometimes if you zoom in and select them, it can be easier. Sometimes if you select the points at the end of the lines, that can also be easier. So now we have those top-level dimensions just to give an overview of the general size of the product. We could also add something, maybe like a simple table that shows our catalyst. Can do this by Guangzhou annotations tables and then well-done cut list. And then we just need to choose the part that we want in the cutlass four. So a cut list in sheet metal is basically the same as a bill of materials in a normal assembly. Once we've chosen the part, we can press OK. And now I've got this table that follows the mouse around and we can click to place that kinetic this in the same way as any normal table. I'm not gonna go through this now, but you can change things like the description and the columns and all of those details. We could also maybe add some balloons to point to the LED and the base. And then we can specify in the cutlasses which number is pointing to which sheets. So there we have a very basic overview of sheet metal drawings. If we actually wanted to make these parts though, this drawing doesn't really have the detail that we need. So in the next video, we'll look at splitting the drawing up into two individual sheets for the late and the base. And we're looking at adding flat patents. But to very quickly recap this one, sheet metal drawings are broadly the same as normal 2D drawings. You just choose a sheet and then you lay out the views that you want. Then you add any dimensions you need, tables, annotations, and so on. 40. Drawing Flat Patterns: In the previous video, we made really quite basic drawing that I showed an overview of our parts. But in this one we're going to split them down into individual sheets so we can show a bit more detail. Let's go back to that drawing that we made in the first video. And this is just the first sheet. So we can rename this as assembling by right-clicking on the sheet name down here and pressing Rename. Then let's add a new sheet by pressing this button next to it. So now we have a totally new blank sheets and we can rename this one as lead. Now we want to add some views of our model, but instead of pulling them all in manually, we can actually go to View layout and choose Standard three view. Here we've got the model file open. And if you don't have it here, it just means it's not open in SolidWorks. So you can click browse and find it. But before we press OK. Let's go down to the bottom and choose, select bodies. Now, you can choose which one of the bodies we want to use in this drawing, the lead or the base, we actually just want to let. So all we have to do is click on the LED in the graphics area. It's called him one. So it's named after the last feature in that body. So we can press OK. And now we're back in the drawing. And if we zoom in, we've just got those three standard views of just the lead. As usual, we can change all of these views here on the left. Sizes, orientation, view, style, and things like that. If we want to adjust the body later, we can also click on a view and then press bodies here on the left. And then we can choose a different body if we want. So looking at the sheet was still missing quite a bit of information. So now we're going to add a flattened version of the model, also known as a Flat Patton, and some bending details. To do this, let's go to Model View and then choose our part. Then click on the next arrow. We've got a range of standard options down here at the moment, but there's no flat part an option. That's because we don't have a body selected at the moment. And we have to choose a body before we add the flap pattern. Because remember we can only flatten one body at once. So let's choose, select bodies. Let's choose that lead body again. So now down here when we go back to the drawing, now we've got this flat pow1 option. Let's put a check in that box. Now we've got this flat pattern View following the mouse around. And we can left-click to place that anywhere in the drawer it. And if we zoom in, we can see we've got a flattened version with all the bend lines. And then we've got all this text that's a bit jumbled up at the moment. So if we zoom in, we've got that him there, we've got those rounded corners at the back. And these grey lines are the bend lines. So this is the M section, this is the front with the edge flange. Then here on the side we've got the bend lines for the edge flanges on him. Then all these items of texts are the bend notes. These indicate how the Ben's should actually be made. Their bit bunched up at the moment. So I'm going to move them out of the way. But as we do, we don't know which bend each one of them refers to. So what you can do to make it a little bit clearer is just left-click on the bend note. So select it. And then here on the left we can choose a leader. So that will just put an arrow to the bend that, that bend notice talking about. So you see as I add the leaders, you can see which Ben line each of these notes is referring to. And looking at the notes themselves, this up means that we have to bend upwards. 90 degrees is the angle of the bend. And then R1 is the radius of the bend. Then this one up 180, 0.05. that's the ham because it's got that very tie internal radius. So you can adjust the bend notes as you like. We can also click on the flat pattern itself, and then we get some more options on the left. Firstly, you can adjust the angle. So maybe if we spun this around, it would fit into the drawing a bit more efficiently. You can also turn off the bend notes if you want, or you can adjust them using this option. If you want to hide the bend lines for any reason, if you just want the outline, then you can zoom in. You can right-click on the bend lines and just press Hide. If you then want to reshow the bend lines later, you'll have to do this from the drawing feature tree. So here on the left were on the lead sheet, which is this one. We want the latest drawing, which is this one at the bottom. Then I'm going to expand the part underneath it. Gonna go all the way down to the flat pattern. Expand the flat Patton feature, then also expand the flat pattern that we're working in, which is the lead. And then finally we've got the bend lines there. We can click on that and we can press shout, and there they are again. When you're dimensioning flat patterns, it can be very easy to get very cluttered with your dimensions because you've got potentially a lot of numbers all pointing to a very small area. So a good way to get around this is to use what are called ordinate dimensions. This means putting all the dimensions onto one single line that's measured from 0 ordinate or zero-point and will demonstrate that now. Firstly, let's choose the annotation tab and then click on the drop-down under Smart Dimension. And here we've got the ordinate dimension. This is just the standard general coordinate dimension. There's also the horizontal and vertical coordinates. And these can be useful if you're having trouble picking up a particular orientation. But usually you can just use this first option and then pick up the orientation that you want automatically. So choose ordinate dimension. And this works pretty similar to Smart Dimension. I'm gonna zoom in and I'm going to select a line like this left-hand edge and then just drag it out. And this is now a 0 for the rest of the ordinate dimension. We can now add extra dimensions from that 0. So everywhere we click will add another dimension. So I can select these band lines and go all the way over to this side. And then we've got all of those dimensions in quite small area. You might see as you add dimensions that some of them get bit bunched up and overlap each other. If this happens, you can rebuild press Control B, and it should sort itself out. If it doesn't sort itself out, you can always right-click on a dimension, go to display options, and then press re jog on. And that should sort out all the spacing for you. If you miss any dimensions, you can later right-click on the ordinate and then press add two coordinate. Then we can maybe go in and choose these extra points. And you see that dimensions are now a bit messed up that sort of written over each other. So I'm going to rebuild by pressing control Bay and now they've sought themselves out. You can also select individual dimensions and delete them or move them around if needed. So ordinate dimensions are a really good way of avoiding your drawing, getting too cluttered, and still sharing the information that you need. Just to demonstrate their use again, going to select the ordinate dimension and then chooses arrow point. This time I'm going to choose this horizontal line and drag out to the left. And then I'm just gonna click to add new points of the dimension. Also note your zeros. It doesn't necessarily have to be at the far edge of your model. You could go in two directions, but usually it's just easier to read and work with if you just starting at a fixed edge. And again, if you're dimensions get bunched up, you can either try rebuilding or we can right-click on one of them and then go to display ordinates, re jog ordinate, and that should fix that. Now our drawings got quite a lot more detail, isn't quite finished, but maybe could actually use this to make this part. Remember when you're doing sheet metal drawings, if you're using flat patterns, make sure somewhere on your drawing that you specify the sheet thickness. It can be easy to overlook sometimes. So maybe you can just write it as a note. You could say something like one millimeter thick steel sheet. Or maybe could Dimension one of the side views and put the thickness on their. Once you've added all of your notes and sort out your title block and everything. You can then save this drawing as a PDF. You can do this just by going to File Save As and then changing the type to PDF. And that could look something like this. So to quickly recap these drawing details, you can make specific sheets for parts. And then you can choose to show a certain body in the drawing. We can show the flat patent views by going to modal view, selecting the body you want if needed, and then choose the flat pattern. You can add the bend notes and the details if required. And if you're dimensioning a flat Batson, it can be easier to use ordinate dimensions to avoid you drawing gate to muddled with lots of traditional dimensions. The ordinate dimension can be found under the Smart Dimension tool. So first set as 0 ordinate, and then you add the other points that I mentioned from that 0. In the next video, the last one in this section, we'll look at actually exporting your sheet metal parts for use in the real world. 41. Exporting 2D Files for Manufacturing: Earlier in this section, we covered how to make 2D drawings from your paths. And these paper drawings are very useful, especially for things like the bend and assembly details. But in reality, in modern manufacturing, it's highly likely that your flat sheet is going to be made by a machine, maybe something like a laser or plasma cutter or water jet, or a number of other machines. For these options, it's much better if you have a flat 2D file that these machines can work directly with. There's a number of file formats that you can use, and this will depend exactly on what your specific machine needs. But the two most common are called DXF and dw J. These are both fairly similar formats. They can both display 2D info in a vector format. So this is basically images made up of entities, things like lines, circles, curves, and so on. There's many situations where these two formats can be used interchangeably. But actually the DW G file is proprietary to Autodesk, So it's owned by Autodesk. The people who make auto cat. On the other hand, DXF is more open source so it can be used by anyone. And what I found is that the DXF is more useful because it can be read by a wide variety of types of programs. Dw G is useful if you working in AutoCad because it's got more Auto CAD specific information in it. But obviously we're working in SolidWorks. And probably we want to send this file to a third party program that runs a laser cutter or something like that. So I would recommend using DXF files to actually export these first flatten your part. So first we need to choose which body we want. If lesson, I'm going to expand the flat pattern and we're going to choose the lead. And then I'm going to suppress that flat pattern feature. So there we have the flat LED. And now we can go to a top-down view. So we're looking at straight on. So this is a flat version of the LED and we want to export this for a laser cutter or something like that. Let us go to File Save As, and then just change the Save As Type. And let's change it to DXF down here. And you can see D wj is next door in the less that. You can also adjust the options by clicking here. There's loads of sub options. I tend to leave these all on the default settings, and it's very rare that that causes a problem. But on the off chance that you are manufacturing needs a specific version, Cyprus, something like that. You can change these options here. So I'm just going to cancel out of that. So now we're still saving as the DXF type. We've got the filename here. So I'm going to press OK to start saving. Before we actually save, we've got a lot of options here on the left. We can choose Actually what we export. We're gonna do sheet metal. We can choose which body to explore, and we can choose exactly what we want to export which kinds of entities. So in this case I'm gonna check geometry and also bend lines. And then I'm going to press OK. Now we should get a preview of what we're going to export. These solid outer lines are the actual footprint of the file. And then these dashed lines are the bend lines. And with this preview you can zoom in, you can drag around. If you find you've got lines that you don't need, you can left-click on them and press delete. In this preview control zed doesn't work for Under the can use this undo option down here. We might also look at this preview and realize actually we don't want the bed lines. If we're sending this to a laser cutter, it might just confuse them because we just want to cut the outer shape. So in this case you can press Cancel, and that doesn't cancel the entire save operation. It just takes us back one step. Now we can un-check the bend lines and we can press OK. again. And now we've just got that outer perimeter. So we can press Save to save that file. In terms of actually opening your DXF file. By default, you'll probably have the E drawings viewer installed. This is usually installed along with Solid Works. And you can use this to open you DXF and check everything looks okay. So here we see in a drawings, you can't really see it that well, but we've just got that outer line around there. You can also open these DX F's in solid works as a collection of sketch lines. You can also open it in other 2D CAD programs if you want to edit it. So a good F31 is called Libri cat. And this allows you to easily adjust the lines and things like that. You can also import these DXF fs into Adobe Illustrator and they'll import as vector artwork. So things like lines and circles, you can scale without losing any detail. So this can be really useful, maybe if you're making something like packaging or even Labels and printing that to go on your parts. Then finally, you can also save directly as an Adobe Illustrator file in SolidWorks just by going to File Save As and then choosing AI. So that covers exporting flat patents to quickly recap. So use your files with other machines and programs. You'll probably need to export them as a 2D vector file to common formats for this RDD, wj, and DXF. They're both similar in a lot of ways, but I would recommend you use DXF just because it's more readable by a larger variety of machines and programs in my experience. To save your files first flatten them if needed, and then just choose File Save as, set the type as DXF, adjust the options if you need to, but usually I just leave those as default. Then choose the items you want to explore, the bend lines or the outer lines or whatever you need. Check the preview and press save. You can double-check your file using E drawings and you can also edit it using 2D CAD programs i libri CAD, or even importing it into Adobe Illustrator. So now we're pretty much at the end of the course, will have one final video next, summing up everything we've learned so far. 42. SM42 Conclusion and Course Recap: We've now reached the end of our sheet metal course. Well done for going through the whole course, and hopefully this has been useful for you and you've learned how to use sheet metal. This video is just going to be a very quick run through of the entire course. We started off by introducing what sheet metal is and how it can be used to make different parts from a flat metal sheet. Remember, you don't necessarily have to use sheet metal for metal objects in solid works. It can also be useful for things like cardboard or paper for things like packaging or even origami. In terms of actually using the sheet metal features, there's a few ways to make a sheet metal part in solid works. The first is just by creating a base ******. This is an initial flat part, and then you can add features to that. Once the sheet metal part started, we can consider things like the bend radius in the bend allowance. Things like the K factor. These will depend on which materials you're using, but it's likely that you're probably going to use steel which is generally stronger and cheaper. Or aluminum which is lighter but also costs more. The thickness of your sheet can be specified in gauge, but the actual physical thickness of certain gauge numbers depends on the material that you're using. I'd recommend also specifying the thickness in inches or millimeters just to avoid any confusion there. Moving on to the actual sheet metal features. The most basic and probably the most common one is the edge ******. And we can add this to our base ****** and then specify an angle and a length and the type of bend and loads of other options. We can also add tabs and holes to build up more complex features. Moving on to slightly more advanced features, we can add mit *******. And these allow us to make more complex ******* easily with just simple sketches. And also the mit, the corners, the material in the corner is cut away so the corners fit together properly. Similar to mitre ****** is the sweat ******. This also allows you to make complex ******* on multiple edges, but it doesn't it to the corners. It doesn't add the bend relief there, it just goes round the corner in a nice little curve. We can add features like hems, which are folded over sections of metal, and these can be used to strengthen the edge and improve how it looks. We also looked at jogs. These are z shaped bends in the material that offset the sheet, and they allow overlapping sections. These can help us join different sheets together for better welding or for fasteners. They also allow us to do things like make a lid that fits inside a base. We can also add cross breaks. These are just a visual feature in solid works, but they're used in real parts. To strengthen flat faces, we can add gusts, these strengthen edge *******. And we can cut vents using a simple sketch and the vent feature. Then finally, we looked at the tab and slot tool. This allows us to create these overlapping tabs and slots that can be used to join different sheets of the same part together, as well as adding ******* to edges. We can also sketch lines and use these to create sketched bends. This can be useful for adding bends that aren't lined up with existing edges. Another of the more complicated features we looked at was the lofted bend. This allows you to create smooth formed pieces or more angled section bends between different profiles. This can be a useful tool, but just be aware that it might be hard to physically manufacture some of the parts that you can make with this tool. At any point during sheet metal modeling, you can use the usual solid works features, things like mirroring and patterning. And we can also flatten our entire model and see how it looks as a flat sheet and check to see if we have any problems. Flatten can only be used at the end of the model. We can also manually unbend and bend features, and this can be useful when adding features that straddle bends, such as cuts on an edge. We looked at corner details such as breaking the corners, filling in the gaps, adding world beads, and adding corner relief. As well as making sheet metal parts from a simple base ******. You can also start with existing solid parts and then convert them to sheet metal. In general, it's better to start with the base ******. It gives you more flexibility, but you can also use these other techniques. The first one was insert bends. This allows you to convert a shelled out solid part into a sheet metal part. The part needs to have uniform wall thickness, the same wall thickness throughout. And then firstly, we set a fixed base, and then we inserted the edge bends and we ripped any edges if needed. A similar method is used with a convert to sheet metal option. This lets you take solid parts and make them into sheet metal. It's quite similar to the Insert bends in that we choose a fixed face and then we add bends and rip lines. This option works a bit better with solid parts and it gives you a bit more control over the sheet thickness. Another aspect of sheet metal that we looked at was the use of forming tools. These are pressed into a metal sheet and they can add extra details like louvers and handles and so on. We saw that Solid works has got a collection of these in the design library. But as they are, they might not be that useful because the size of them is very specific. However, you can easily modify these tools for your own use and you can also create custom forming tools. Just be aware that in real life, these might be expensive or slow to manufacture. Once we had gone over all other features and tools, we just ran through creating a multibody enclosure using some of those techniques. And then we use that to take a look at sheet metal drawings. These are generally similar to other two D drawings, but we can insert flat pattern views with the bend notes of how the parts will actually be made. Remember that if you have a multi body part, then you have to specify which body you want to flatten at once, because you can only flatten one at a time. You can also use ordinate dimensions in your drawings to stop them getting too cluttered because flat patterns tend to need a lot of dimensions close together. Then finally, we looked at how you can export your two D files for use in other programs and machines like laser cutters. For this, I would recommend the DXF format, but Solid Works does have quite a wide variety of two D options. Maybe speak to you manufacturer and see what they want. This brings us to the end of the course and hopefully this covers all the main points of sheet metal and gives you the skills needed to create sheet metal parts. If you've got any other questions, then please let me know in the Q and A section below. Also, please show some of your creations that you come up with. I always like to see the designs that people make with the skills that they learn on these courses. All that remains is to say, thank you very much for taking the course and happy modeling.