hi everyone ı have this model (solid close polysurface) to needs to be flatten for cnc how can ı do it?
UnrollSrf will do most of it for you - you’ll just need to unroll the external faces since you will lose your thickness
There is a bit of the black arts required.
i) Extractsrf (duplicate) inside wall of your polysrf
ii) join the duplicated surfaces to a polysrf.
iii) Offsetsrf this polysrf by wall thickness*k-factor. This the dark knowledge bit you will have to acquire from your bender. It is a number dependent on the material, corner radius and material thickness. For steel it is usually 0.4-0.5.
iv) Unrollsrf to give you a flat development surface.
v) Trace around this surface to get back to lines and arcs (your laser profiler will appreciate it)
I would leave the “black art” stuff up to the bending people and just send them 3D of the result I want.
If this is for some quick and dirty DIY mockup just do the mid surface…
Agree, the sheet metal fabricators I used so far (Sweden, UK, Germany) want just that. Then, according to their long-term experience, machine behaviour, and sheet metal stock, they do what needs to be done to get it right.
That’s what you’re paying them for. Doing this exercise yourself is just to help with quoting.
They’re going to rebuild it in SolidWorks or SolidEdge sheetmetal, which itself is a black art from watching engineers struggle to do anything that’s not a box like this(they’re not even going to re-use your model if it’s the same software!) which might lead to $20K of aluminum parts turning out 2” too big, but that’s THEIR responsibility, don’t make it yours lol…