Sheet Metal Thicken

Seems like there are two or three questions here:

• Can you make the base feature an unattached wall? No, unattached walls are secondary walls created as unattached so that they can be merged with the base or other secondary walls, often to 'fill in' gaps.

• Do extruded walls have to be thickened in sketcher? No, not when created as secondary walls; there they take their thickness from the geometry they are attaching to. Thickening in sketcher is used, whether on primary or secondary walls to achieve demensioning to the inside surface of a sheetmetal bend, the inside bend radius. This is because this radius is formed by hard tooling and has to be incorporated into that tooling. This can be accomplished by drawing the inside radius and adding thickness to the outside of the part. The exception occurs when inflection changes direction, where inside becomes outside.

David Janes