Designing A Sheet Metal Enclosure With Solidworks

Solidworks has assembled a great set of tools for working with sheet metal.

Designing a sheet metal enclosure with solidworks.

There are specific sheet metal features you can use to create sheet metal bodies quickly. So take a firsthand walk through designing a sheet metal enclosure for circuit boards and panel mounted connectors as well as fans power cords and switches with solidworks. Https youtu be igtu6tq ao how to download and install solidworks 2016. However it s up to us as designers to use these tools to create parts that can be easily and efficiently manufactured.

Gabriel sheet metal is a complex industry and understanding the basic process and fundamentals is essential to designing parts that are easy to manufacture. Sheet metal parts are generally used as enclosures for components or to provide support to other components. When you add a base flange feature to a solidworks part the part is marked as a sheet metal part. Real world projects are vital to mastering solidworks and sheet metal enclosures are a perfect example of a typical project.

Sheet metal enclosures house and protect circuitry wiring and other sensitive electronic parts and frequently require customization by a professional cad designer. A base flange is the first feature in a new sheet metal part. As a standard feature solidworks make this pattern for you based it on your previously designed model. Before any bending you have to cut the sheet metal.

That means you need a contour of the sheet metal to be cut known as a flat pattern. Bends are added wherever appropriate and sheet metal specific features are added to the feature manager design tree. The base flange feature is created from a sketch. Solidworks 2012 and up.

You can design a sheet metal part on its own without any references to the parts it will enclose you can design the part in the context of an assembly that contains the enclosed components or you can design the part within another part document in a multibody environment. Throughout these lessons we will be creating a sheet metal part for an electrical enclosure confined and driven by a design envelope along with various tools including the edge and miter flanges bolt holes a vent and various other features. However in some circumstances when the design requires certain types of geometry you can use non sheet metal feature tools then insert bends or convert the part to sheet metal. Https youtu be oloi1ogbsx8 amazon free unlimi.

Solidworks sheet metal enclosure part design. So take a firsthand walk. The real power of solidworks comes when you have to design bent sheet metal a task which looks simple but really isn t.