At our company, we're working to enhance our Creo Sheetmetal modeling practices to better support manufacturing. One idea we're exploring is adding small notches or cutouts at the ends of bend lines to help suppliers align bends more easily, without manual measurement.
I've attempted to create a UDF for this purpose, but it's not as user-friendly or automated as we'd like. Ideally, we'd want Creo to automatically place these notches at the ends of each bend line during the modeling process.
My questions are:
Is there a built-in or recommended method in Creo Sheetmetal to automate the placement of such notches?
Can bend line geometry be accessed or referenced to allow for automatic notch placement?
ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Accepted Solutions
When you unbend a Sheetmetal part Creo should create axes at all of the bends in the model, these axes will all lie in the plane of the fixed wall referenced when unbending the part. This provides an axis in place of bend line selection should it be needed.
I would add these notches to the flat pattern of the part after of all the bends are in the design of the part. With the UDF you want to minimize the references needed to place it in the design. With a flattened part you can use shared sketch plane references to set up the sketcher and then rather than using the bend line you could use the edges of the bends and drop the notches at the midpoint of these edges.
You can use copy/paste special with adv ref config to quickly drop the notches on each bend using some map keys and user selection of the edges of each bend. A simple example of this done on an unbent part design are shown below. I would only use the UDF to create the first set of notches in a model, then I would use paste special to more quickly copy the notches faster than using the UDF as I would only select half the references with paste special functionality vs the UDF.
Thank you for your response. I will have to look into the possibility of developing custom software for this purpose. However, since that might not be a viable option for us, I would greatly appreciate any help in creating a UDF that is as user-friendly as possible.
So far, the best solution I’ve managed involves placing the notches based on three surfaces: the surface of the extrude, an offset surface, and the edge surface where the notch is created, see pictures below. The issue with this approach is that the notches must be added first, and the bend then created to align with them. This also limits us to using the “Bend” tool, rather than alternatives like the “Flat” tool.
Ideally, the UDF would reference the bend line directly, as you suggested, but implementing that is beyond my current level of expertise.
When you unbend a Sheetmetal part Creo should create axes at all of the bends in the model, these axes will all lie in the plane of the fixed wall referenced when unbending the part. This provides an axis in place of bend line selection should it be needed.
I would add these notches to the flat pattern of the part after of all the bends are in the design of the part. With the UDF you want to minimize the references needed to place it in the design. With a flattened part you can use shared sketch plane references to set up the sketcher and then rather than using the bend line you could use the edges of the bends and drop the notches at the midpoint of these edges.
You can use copy/paste special with adv ref config to quickly drop the notches on each bend using some map keys and user selection of the edges of each bend. A simple example of this done on an unbent part design are shown below. I would only use the UDF to create the first set of notches in a model, then I would use paste special to more quickly copy the notches faster than using the UDF as I would only select half the references with paste special functionality vs the UDF.
