I stayed up late last night watching a long collection of sheet metal related videos. Some were tutorials on how to bend metal by hand or with simple tools, with a hammer, a leaf brake or a box and pan brake; some others dealt with the design of tools and dies. I know this doesn’t replace visiting a real shop and (hopefully) getting a try at bending a piece of metal myself, but the videos we...

One thing I’m learning quickly about Sheet Metal product design is that coming up with a sheet metal part or assembly in SolidWorks (or even a hand-drawn pattern for that matter) is only the first part of the story.  The interesting part is now figuring out how it is going to be fabricated! This means that, besides a pattern, we also need to come up with a sequence of operations that takes into...

Unlike others, I was never introduced to sheet metal forming techniques while in high school or even in college. There was a class we all were required to take on manufacturing processes, where it was briefly discussed, and we also had a shop were we learned to use a few tools and machines, like the lathe, as well as several welding methods. I used to cut and prepare metal for welding, but I can h...

This part is an IGES file that is included in the SolidWorks 2007 Sheet Metal Training Manual as one of the examples on how to convert an imported (dumb) part to sheet metal. According to the explanations in the manual, this can be done as a two step process, by first using the Rip feature to select edges or corners that will be cut with a small gap in order to allow the part to be flattened as...

So there I was, seating in a meeting room with my older son’s SLP, his two teachers and the principal. We were discussing what his progress in speech therapy had been so far, and what other areas of concern would be addressed this year. One of the teachers then proceeded to describe my son’s behavior in class and what she considered a source of potential trouble. “The boy seems a little too ...