Post by r***@gmail.comHi, I would like some help with the flex feature, if I can get some
answers withouth arguing with people that would be great!
As an industrial designer, I find that the flex tool is only useful
for one thing, living hinges, other than that, you can make some cool
drill bits and stuff like that. the only thing I can't seem to wrap
my head around is how to control it. I know that it will not be exact
but we are only talking about a living hinge, if it is off by 1mm, it
would still work. So if anyone knows a good tutorial on using the
flex tool, mainly the bend feature, please let me know.
Thanks in advanve and please stop the bickering over whos right or
not.
I wish I knew about a good tutorial - this is a tough feature to use
accurately.
And it CAN be used accurately if you spend the time to fight the
innacuracies that SWx tries to include (tip - keep an eye on each
number as you add constraints - 180� will be turned into 179.67 � as
you change paramters, presumably to *help* you, but it doesn't)
It can be decent on living hinges. It has been a while since I did it
last and this might no longer apply (in 2007), but I used a layout
sketch to work out the start and end points for the hinge 'flex'
region and tied my start and end planes to that sketch. Then I
struggled with it for about an hour, but got what I needed out of it.
One thing to keep in mind is that, like most SWx features, you have to
know the 'real world' correlation to the feature to use it correctly.
As one of the trolls pointed out (google 'internet troll' to find out
about this pathetic hobby - they will latch onto one thing in your
post and hammer it without regard to the main thrust of your question)
drill bits are not made by taking a piece of metal and twisting it, so
flex doesn't make sense as a feature to make a drill bit.
However, if you take a molded part modeled in the 'as molded'
condition and then use 'flex' to fold the part along a living hinge to
check how it will close, that is kosher. In other words - only use
flex to bend parts that are bent after their manufacture to some
nominal state defined by other features (or are bent as some part of
the manufacturing process, assuming more worthy and reliable
processes, like sheetmetal, don't apply)
Same goes for deform - it can seem easy to model a project using
deform, but my position is that you should have modeled a curved shape
to that curved state in the first place. The only time I used deform
was a few years back when mold-flow analysis showed that the part
would warp in the wrong direction and I knew that our molder lacked
the skill to correct it before cutting the tool. So I used deform to
warp the part into a condition that would shrink and warp back into
the correct nominal state for the part. Worked great.
Hope this helps
Ed 'F*** the trolls, lets talk Swx' Eaton
