Advice on textiles, composites and castings. 1

[coolcad]

All,

My company makes ballistic protective eyewear for the military. We are expanding our product line to head, face and neck protection. This creates some new challenges when it comes to SolidWorks and documenting our designs. I'm hoping some of you can offer suggestions to help us with a few things.

We are good with creating models and drawings for plastic injection molded parts, machined parts and sheet metal. But we are could use some advice on textiles and pattern making as well as composites and metal castings.

For metal castings (alum and zinc) (small sized parts) is there any industry standard tolerance block and notes we should put on our formats?

For textiles, we can somewhat model these items but expecting SolidWorks to generate pattern drawings in most cases is unlikely. I imagine we will have to draw the patterns by hand. But same question as the castings, is there any industry standard tolerance block and notes we should put on our formats for textiles?

Composites are much more complicated. I imagine layups would be handle like a textile pattern.

My first concern is to set up some standard formats for the various types of parts. Would anyone be willing to send me sample formats or drawings that they have seen or used for textiles, castings, and composites?

Thanks,

Glenn Wilkins, CSWP,CSWP-SMTL
Colchester, VT

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

For some casting notes, see page 4 of this link.

 

[coolcad]

Good stuff. Thanks for sharing.

Glenn Wilkins, CSWP,CSWP-SMTL
Colchester, VT

 

[kellnerp]

Look at the SW solution partners.

This one comes to mind.

For composites
Simulayt

TOP
CSWP, BSSE

http://www.engtran.com

http://www.niswug.org

http://www.linkedin.com/in/engineeringtransport

"Node news is good news."

 

[coolcad]

Very cool. Thanks!!

Glenn Wilkins, CSWP,CSWP-SMTL
Colchester, VT

 

[drawoh]

coolcad,

I have designed a fibreglass housing. It is my one and only fibreglass part. The fabricator asked for the SolidWorks model, and they converted it to sheet metal to get a flat layout for their fibreglass.

JHG

 

[coolcad]

Sheet metal in SolidWorks is very powerful. I was checking out some of the solution partners like was suggested above and there are a couple other forming applications that might work as well. Fascinating stuff.

But what I could really use a hand with is some sample pattern drawings, tolerances etc. so i can set up my formats.

Thanks!!

Glenn Wilkins, CSWP,CSWP-SMTL
Colchester, VT

 

[kellnerp]

There is also a way to make a flat pattern from any arbitrary shape in SW but it is very labor intensive. If you only have to do one or two this might be the way.

TOP
CSWP, BSSE

http://www.engtran.com

http://www.niswug.org

http://www.linkedin.com/in/engineeringtransport

"Node news is good news."

 

[rstupplebeen]

For composites on a doubly curved surface like a hemisphere the fabric needs to shear and deform to drape over without wrinkles. For this type of simulation fibersim is a common tool. I believe you would need to upgrade to Catia though. Another common way is to do it by hand by draping the fabric and then cutting to size and see what shape you get. Welcome to the world of composites! Just wait till they want FEA of ballistics on composites now that is fun!

Rob Stupplebeen

https://sites.google.com/site/robertkstupplebeen/

 

[coolcad]

Looking at your resume, you know exactly what we are talking about!!! Thanks,

Glenn Wilkins, CSWP,CSWP-SMTL
Colchester, VT

 

[Updraft]

Glenn,

Congratulations on expanding your domain. It sounds like you are also expanding your needs to include industries/processes you might not be intimate with. For industry standard notes/tolerances, etc. you should be in touch with your vendors. If they aren't glad/willing to help then they aren't a good choice for a vendor. Often you can send them your part and ask them how they would detail it on a drawing. Upfront communications to build a win-win relationship with your vendors pays HUGE dividends. You should also ask for their suggestions to make the parts more manufacturable and to learn about features/capabilities of which you might not be aware. Include in your data gathering the organizations such as the white metals and precision die cast societies, etc. They are there to promote their technologies and they have terrific tools to shorten your learning curve.

Good hunting!

- - -Updraft

 

[coolcad]

That's a good point as well. I did ask one of our strap suppliers about tolerances and they came back with +/- 2% to +/- 3% which kind of makes sense. So the tolerance block might look something like this in mm:
0.0 to 24.99 ±1.00
25.00 to 99.99 ±3.00
100.00 to 299.99 ±5.00
300.00 to 599.99 ±7.00
600.00 to 1000.00 ±10.00

But I would love to get a copy of a typical technical pattern drawing just to get a feel of how it is normally done. Don't know if our suppliers would feel comfortable sending us one of their other customer's drawings. You'd think I could Google a sample drawing but have not found one yet.

Since posting this thread, I did find some alum/zinc casting tolerances. This is what I've found:

TOLERANCE GUIDE
STANDARD LINEAR TOLERANCE
0 – 1.0” +/-0.010"
< 3.0” +/-0.016”
< 6.0” +/-0.025"
< 9.0” +/-0.032”
< 24.0” +/-0.035”
STANDARD FLATNESS TOLERANCE: 0.002 in/in (0.040” max)
STANDARD STRAIGHTNESS TOLERANCE: 0.002 in/in (0.040” max)
WALL & SECTION THICKNESS: 0.040”- 0.120” +/-0.010” ; > 0.120” +/-0.015”

Thanks!

Glenn Wilkins, CSWP,CSWP-SMTL
Colchester, VT