I have found the following useful when measuring awkard items. Scrap shims of various thicknesses combined with a feeler gauge. Just make sure that you debur the edges of the shims so that they sit flat. A digital angle finder is also very useful — Abe has a manual one, but he borrows my digital one a lot. It measures to one tenth of a degree and there are buttons to zero it and to display the reverse angle which means that you don’t need to do any math. It’s well worth the $16. I also 3D printed narrow sections of the bend profiles to fine tune clearances. For example, the thin black piece in the upper right of the picture above is the profile of the main shield and a welded mounting arm.
Like the other heat shields, this one required me to learn a few more sheet metal tricks:
Tutorial:
I spent a little over two hours watching a tutorial on Solidworks sheet metal features; 80% I knew, 10% showed me how to do certain things better, 5% was completely new and 5% was irrelevant to my use case. The high-end CAD packages have a lot of advanced features and it’s worth spending a little time and money to access quality online training.
Unfold and Fold Features:
For the last two heat shields I was able to use Solidwork’s Corner Relief feature to ensure that bending wouldn’t deform the corners. However, no matter what I tried, SendCutSend rejected several of the bends because it didn’t like several of the corner reliefs. The solution was to use the Unfold feature to flatten the problem flanges, add extruded cuts to the problem corners, and then refold the flanges via the Fold feature. Problem solved.
Closed Corner Feature:
Once the bend radius and K-factor are set for the type and thickness of material, the software automatically calculates the bend allowances which is great. However, I had several areas where after making several bends the material bent back onto itself and I wanted to ensure that the gap was tight enough to be welded. Fortunately, Solidworks has a Closed Corner feature that does exactly that. You simply click on the two edges that you’d like to “close,” specify the desired distance between those edges, and then choose one of three options; (1) butted, (2) edge A overlapping edge B or (3) edge B overlapping edge A. SendCutSend specifies 15 thousands as the minimum tolerance which worked out great.
In the picture below, the feature is closing the corner between the two blue edges. The yellow part showing how one of the flanges is being extended. The second flange remains unchanged because I had specifically trimmed it in a previous step, but in many cases both sides are extended. You can also see the left most (i.e., butted) of the three options is selected and that the distance is 15 thousands of an inch.