Bent Plate in CAD

I am CADing a snail bot and I have no idea how to CAD a bent plate for the ball to ride up. Can someone direct me on how I would bend a plate, or send a CAD of an already bent plate?

You’ll need to tell us what CAD software you are using. The generic answer is that you’ll need to learn how to create your own parts, not just assemble existing parts.

Sorry, I am using fusion 360

You could just create a sketch and extrude a piece that matches the shape you want. This would serve as a placeholder in your CAD model and you could put in an actual plate later on the real bot.

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ahhh thats a great idea thank you!!

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I think that if you go into the sheet metal tools tab you could also create a flat pattern on a standard piece of metal and then use the sheet metal rules feature to define the bends you want to create. It a bit more complicated but It should allow for better calculation of hole location.
Hope this helps!

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I plan to cut and bend my “ball sleeve” out of lexan or a similar material. The way I modeled that in fusion 360 was to first set up my intake system, and then trace out, in a 2D sketch, the circumference of the intake plus a 6.45 inch radius (giving some extra space for anti-slip mat). I exported that sketch to a different file, and applied an offset of the profile equal to the thickness of the material I’ll be using. Then I could extrude that into 3 dimensions, and make any small adjustments I needed. You can save this as a new component and add it to your assembly afterwards.

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that is more or less what I did when I created a sketch although the 6.45 radius instead of 6.3 is a good point and a change I need to make

Does anyone know how to do this in Onshape? I am trying to do the exact same thing and make a piece of lexan that will go up the tube of my hood robot.

If you will be using machined parts to bent, be sure to look into the bend allowance for your bender machine to ensure your holes are accurate

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What I did was first sketched out the “side view” of what it would look like, then I just extruded it.

I’ve never tried this and just thought of it, but you could try making a circular pattern out of aluminum bars

Yes u could not you would probably have to make the pattern from an axis or something like that

Thanks for the help.

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