Unattached blend wall

[ptc-4339982]

I have created a ducting part in sheetmetal by firstly creating an extrude with thickness for the initial box. From there I have added a square to round using an unattached blend wall. What I am left with as the picture shows is a small gap between the features.

I could have probably created a blend feature with several sections to do the same however is there a way to remove this gap with the features I already have?

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[David_M]

The picture is a bit too close up to get a good idea of what's going on, but the first things to try would be Edit > Remove and Edit > Offset > Replace (4th one down). Probably best to perform these ops on the inside face of the extrude.

[BrianMartin]

Hi Steve...

First, what version of Pro/E Wildfire or Creo are you using?

Second... I think you're going to have a tough time filling in this gap with your current geometry. Typically when you use an unattached wall, you use the Merge Walls feature to join the unattached wall back into the base geometry. Otherwise you'll have difficuly flattening your geometry and creating a drawing. The Merge Walls feature is going to fail in this case because your unattached wall has to be TANGENT to the base geometry for it to work. I've created a sample piece of geometry to work with... and I've tried adding rounds, extending the geometry, and some other tricks. None of these really give acceptable results.

I reworked the blend so it incorporated a tangent wall (to the base rectangle geometry). This allowed me to use the Merge feature. I still hit problems flattening the square-to-round.

I think taking a different approach to creating your transition is a better approach. Sometimes success in sheetmetal is all about how you use the features to create your geometry. At minimum, you must have 3 sections to your blended piece to even have a CHANCE at attaching the geometry. If you go directly from the flat edge to a round, the transition for the round starts immediately. This destroys your ability to create a tangent between the original rectangle and the blend. If you have a short straight section before you go into your blend, you can achieve tangency and then merge the geometry together.

If you'd like to see this technique, let me know and I'll go through the process of making screenshots.

Good luck!

-Brian

[ptc-4339982]

I came to the conclusion that using a blend protrusion would be the best solution, however this meant starting the part from scratch. I orignally had the square section and modifed the extension at a later stage of design to suit my requirements. I also found that acutally making an alteration to a blend protrusion is quite difficult so neither method particualrly suited my way of designing that part.

I obviously notice a lot of differences between Inventor which I used to use and Creo so these kinds of tasks work in different ways and give varying results.

[BrianMartin]

Hi Steve...

It's much easier if you sketch out your various sections before trying the blended protrusion. Trying to keep them straight while toggling them is a bit messy. I've done more than my fair share of square-to-round transitions in sheet metal. Whenever possible I prefer to start in regular solid model mode and convert over to sheetmetal after the first couple of features. There are numerous benefits to having a model that evolves from solid to sheet metal mode. You have the ability to capture a bit more design intent this way. You also give yourself some much nicer options when adding bends and splitting the model for flattening purposes using the sheet metal Conversion feature.

This is a bit beyond the scope of a small discussion thread but I can provide an example if you'd like to see what I'm talking about

Thanks!

-Brian

[ptc-4339982]

That would be great if its not too much trouble. I have several parts which I decided were far easier to make as a soild as opposed to sheet metal. I also haven't much of an idea of how to seperate/split the parts to create a flat.

Do you also know how to enable the model tree items under the settings tab so that I do not have to keep adding them every session?