Thin sheet metal info, tools and videos


I’m teaching Rhino at the Design Academy Eindhoven and do this based on a sheet metal design assignment. Beside going through the basics (based on Rhino Level 1 training manual) this means the students design a sheet metal product in Rhino over the course of a trimester.

While Rhino natively has no tools to do this, for thin sheet metal design it’s very capable since we can work with a bend factor of 0 (1mm aluminum sheet). In other words, we use the inner surfaces to create the flat drawings and we can work with an inner bend radius of 0 as approximation.
This grasshopper player file automates thickening and rolling out a part.

Furthermore, the thin sheet metal parts need to be connected with rivets (in most cases). For this I have made this script based on the logic of my bolt script, that lets you add rivet block items on a surface and adding them in an organized way to the document.

Another script to help simplify the process is this script to insert cutters (to BooleanDifference the thickened sheets or trim the surface model)

In addition to this, I made several videos related to the process of creating thin sheet metal designs.

If you have questions, or request regarding the videos or the scripts, I’d be happy to hear here, on my youtube channel or on my github page.

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Hi Gijs,

You might want to post this in the Gallery category as well…?
Thanks for sharing!

-Willem

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why the Gallery?

IMO the gallery category is there to showcase anything that involved using Rhino. It’s a place to learn about what other users do with Rhino and get inspired by it.

To me this post fits that description :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’ve published the rivet tool as stgRivets, so now it can be installed through the package manager on both Windows and Mac. It adds these two commands: AddRivets and AddRivetCutters:

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excellent

What a nice subject and integral approach from idea to manufacturing.
I like to investigate it further at a later time.
Your students are lucky with such a teacher!

now on PackageManager : RivetsPro

built is as an exercise in C# based on the earlier posted stgRivets (still on packagemanager), that was built in python. This version is a dialog version of the tool and integrates the functions of adding rivets and adding cutters into one dialog. It also displays an image of the rivet type you are about to insert:
image image

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