TouchCAD for sheet metal unfolding.
TouchCAD can of course also be used for sheet metal work. It comes with
many common pre-defined shapes, but it's biggest benefit is the ability
to handle very complex free form shapes and combinations of many interacting
shapes. TouchCAD 3.5 also adds support for stretch unfold calculations with
the ability to dynamically analyze the tensions as the shape changes.
Design custom parts, based on in-scale drawings or pictures, have a look
at it in 3D and generate a QuickTime movie to visualize it. Bike
Tank movie. (360 K,
QuickTime movie).
TouchCAD provides several tools suitable for generating common sheet metal objects such as knees, T-tube connections, circle to rectangle transformations, cones, etc. The build in modeling tools also allows you to generate custom shapes based on the prefabricated shapes, which takes TouchCAD far beyond being a fixed shape utility. The modification can be fairly simple, such as generating an offset or adding a flange, or be quite complex.
The aluminum boat above illustrates that TouchCAD can handle a very complex model where all major panels have been fitted in the 3D model and then unfolded to generate a cutting layout. It may appear to be a lot of parts but the picture is in fact not even showing all of them.
The boat, owned by Touch-3D programmer Max Vizins and family, is currently under construction and can be seen at it's own web site at: www.vizins.nu
Lundström Design, Ekhagsvägen 7, 104 05 Stockholm,
Sweden
Phone int-46-8-15 46 63, E-mail: info@touchcad.com
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