Sheet Metal Tab And Slot Design

And minimizes the disadvantage of extensive fixturing costs and setup times.

Sheet metal tab and slot design.

A 1 degree tolerance on all bend angles. When designing parts for laser cutting one should not make holes smaller than the thickness of the material. In sheet metal fabrication parts are formed from metal sheets by punching cutting stamping and bending. Because sheet metal products have a history of being designed by the guy who actually does the work on the floor sheet metal products think hvac ducting as well as the lockers in your gym tend to be excellent examples of design for assembly especially when looking at self locating parts which reduce assembly errors.

A part design should exploit welding s advantages and minimize its disadvantages and the tab and slot approach exemplifies this. Sheet metal parts with a minimum of 0 9mm to 20mm in thickness can be manufactured. Tabs the minimum width is equal to two times the material thickness or 3 200 mm whichever is greater while the maximum length is five times the width. 3d cad files are created using a host of different cad packages and then converted into.

It maximizes one of welding s greatest strengths the efficient and complete joining of two components. But it did not last long or the first solidworks users started to demand more functionality like. Sheet metal tab and slot was introduced with solidworks 2018 and it gave engineers a great and fast way for a common time consuming task. Be mindfull if you have tabs on adjacent bends when the part is bent wrong it may or may not fit in all of the slots anymore.

When using slots and tabs the maximum width of the slot must be greater than the thickness of the tab and the tab length should equal the material thickness. I make a lot of weldments and sheet metal parts that are 12ga to 1 2in thk i use 1 32 per side for the slot.