Sheet metal CAD - no thickness

[dwade]

How do I set up my vector points when my CAD model has no thickness to it?

[J Temmen]

You need to know the material direction and nominal thickness, once you know those you can pick the points from the side of cad you do have and enter the nom. mat'l thkns in the thickness box.Just make sure you have the vector the right way and the offset direction the right way.

[dwade]

How do I determine the material direction? I've got the prg done and then realized the points are showing on both sides of the CAD model.

[Matthew D. Hoedeman]

Well, if there is nothing to indicate thickness direction in the data (sometimes it is nothing more than a wire frame outline cut through the part) and there is nothing on the print to tell you, you will have to go to the cad department or the customer to find out. Usually, the print is the 'master' side, so if there is a point called out on the print (XY&Z) you might be able to 'create' that point on the cad and see if all 3 numbers match, but this is not 100%.

If you find out that the side of stock you have is NOT the side you are checking, you will have to enter in the thickness for every point. I think there is a thingie you can download from Wilcox that will do this as a global change, but I do not trust it. In V3.5, if you change the thickness amount in (I think) the edge point, it will NOT come out right unless you do it by using the F9 on the feature (instead of doing it in the edit window), enter the thickness, THEN HIT THE TAB KEY so that it can update the nominals, then finish the feature. If you type in a thickness value and 'finish' the feature, it will show up in the feature in the edit window, but the nominals will NOT HAVE changed, so you will be reporting bad results.

[dwade]

Thank you for the help.

[ag1979]

Glodal update was very useful before but doesn't work that well with 3.7+. For your material problem, if your lucky and are using a fixture that was built properly, you could pickup the fixture and check the nets. That's usually what we do if we don't no which side of metal the CAD file is.

[ag162]

Good Morning,
There are times when you can see the Gage net locations in the cad. You can rotate and check for space between the net identifiers and the model. Also as Matt stated, there should be a wire frame (usually just a line protruding thru the cad or on the edge) that shows direction of the matl.

AG162