Sheet metal auger blade flat pattern?

Sure

You can only have one rotation though

Create a helix for your outside and one for your inside

Then create a 3d sketch and convert entities one for each helix Insert/Sheet Metal/Lofted Bends that is all Corey Scheich

Thank you very much. That worked great!

BTW manufacturing an auger segment is easily achieved by creating a disc of material with an inner and outer diameter, the inner diameter must be slighlty bigger than the arbor and the outer diameter also slightly bigger than the finished auger outer diameter. Make a single cut normal to the circumference through one side of the disc and then stretch it to one auger pitch. These segments can then be welded together to the required length.

your description just jogged my memory. years ago i worked in a shop (food processing) that had a "flight" forming machine. flight in this case refers to "pitch". it was a funky little press with very unique dies. the flight was formed a few inches at a time as the operator rotated through the blank through the press. it took some practice to get different pitches.

I used to work in the Engineering department of the Gleaner combine plant before the plant closed and moved. We made LOTS of augers and made most of our own flighting, and the flat pattern for them was a flat strip on a coil. The way the machine worked was to run this strip in and squeeze one edge of it so that it got longer than the other one. By controlling different rollers and guides, you set the ID, OD, and pitch of the flighting. The upside of the process is that you can make long continuous lengths of flighting. The downside is that the flighting is thicker at the base than it is out at the outside edge. If we needed a constant thickness section in high-wear areas, they had to be cut out of plate and pulled, but you only got one pitch at a time.

WT

Always use caution with lofted bends!!!!!

I remember looking at the lofted bend feature to help automate our auger flighting design, but its results were no where close to what our flat pattern designs from trial and error. I never looked into it much further.

I used to work at a place where we made LOTS of augers mostly for the feed mixing industry (for feedlots and dairies). Our augers had some pretty heavy flighting ranging from .25" to .75" thick and up to 36" in outside diameter.

These heavy augers used sectional flighting, flighting made one pitch at a time. The flat pattern was just a large washer or donut shape with a pie section cutout. That flat pattern is then put in a press in which the top and bottom die is pretty much just a section of flighting. The operator would handle the workpiece, bending a small section of the flight with each stroke of the press. A very simple and inexpensive operation, really, but the process took a lot of skill and experience on the operator's part to know how to manipulate the workpiece and press.

We used some simple formulas and rules of thumb to calculate the shape of the flat pattern. In almost every case, the flat was a trial and error process: cut the flat, bend it, modify the flat, try again.

Furthermore, material, thickness, and shape of the auger (many had notches or holes for mounting knives on the OD) could drastically affect the bending process and flat pattern dimensions.