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msteffke15-Moonstone
15-Moonstone
February 13, 2017
Question

Piping/Cabling for automated tubing bender?

  • February 13, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 4526 views

We are considering investing in an automated tubing bending machine for copper tubing.  From what I know we need to feed it an .STL file.  Is Piping/Cabling the software we need for this?  How does Pro Piping/Cabling relate to Creo Schematics?  They both seem like they do about the same thing.

3 replies

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fmohr12-Amethyst
12-Amethyst
February 13, 2017

Creo/Schematics, for piping, will give you the point-to-point piping connections of an overall system.  It will not give you tube bend data that I'm aware of.  I do believe that the piping package will give you tube bend data so that it can be added to a table in a drawing.  Whether or not you can export that out to a STL file, I'm just not sure.  Sorry, if this is not a lot of help, but the piping package is the right path.

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dschenken1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 13, 2017

Typical bending machines take either XYZ and bend radius data or LRA and bend radius. They don't take STL. That doesn't mean that a service bureau would turn down an STL file; they would have to use it to create the correct tube bender format.

Tube Bending: From CAD to Production | Winton Machine

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JimBarrettSmith5-Regular Member
5-Regular Member
February 14, 2017

Piping design supports *.$$$ and *.FIF which is used by most CNC bending machines. Check whether the machine you are purchasing supported either of these two formats

Thanks, Jim

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dschenken1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 14, 2017

I did not find any references to the $$$ format, but I did find a number of companies offering STEP, IGES, and native format model imports, such as BendPro G2V2 CNC Tube Bender Controls from Univeral Tool and Engineering.

PCX looks like an interesting product.

M
msteffke15-MoonstoneAuthor
15-Moonstone
February 23, 2017

Thanks for all the responses on this, its been helpful.   One more question:  Does the Piping/Cabling seat included in the Creo Engineering III license package include all functionality to export these formats mentioned above?  Or does the floating seat have more abilities?

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