yang686526

designing a dished disc in sheetmetal
i would like to design a dished disc in sheetmetal so i can "unfold" it and get an idea of what the preformed dimensions need to be. is this possible? i can obviously draw the part as a solid but cannot convert it to sheetmetal.
thanks for any help.
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sw sheet metal doesn't know how to unfold deformed shapes. it kind of loses its brains when you start talking about stretching materials.
dan
if you can live with a tiny flat at the bottom of the dish, you can fake it using an edge bend (circular), but i don't know how accurate the flattened result would be.

rhpe,
i think you are talking about metal spinning, rather than sheet metal.
you could assume that the disc will be bent from a flat piece of sheet metal, and break up the curve into discrete, flat sections. is that what you want?
jhg
this is a good case of having your drawing show the final part, and sending the print to the shop or your fabricator and have them fill in the blanks for you. depending on the processes needed to complete the part, it may need to be trimmed anyway after forming.
diego
thanks for the input--i was planning on a coining operation and knew the shop would do provide me with the dimensions but i wanted to get a material estimate.
thanks again.
rhpe,
i you just want an estimate on material usage get a die design handbook. there are formulas for hand calculating material usage.
hold overs from before we had computers do the work for us.
cheers,
anna wood
sw2008 sp5.0, windows vista sp1
ibm thinkpad t61p, t7800, fx570m, 4 gigs of ram
a rough estimate of material usage could be derived from the surface area (volume / thickness) of the final shape.
eric

there are many "old school" ways of getting a rough size, if this is a problem you come up against often you could try blankworks, or at least use the free 7 day trial and solve this problem.