Trying to make sheet metal rules work for paper product prototyping

Hello Fusion Experts,

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I'm a new Fusion 360 user trying to prototype food packaging products such as a cereal box.  The sheet metal rules system seems to be the only one that allows for folds and bends and it's almost exactly what I need.  But the self-intersection constraints and error checking are strict and prevent making the type of folds I can make with cardstock, Kraft paper, and the like. 

I'm wondering if there is any way to disable some of these checks or otherwise allow the behavior of a material besides metal to apply.  I am not looking to avoid best practices and I've taken steps such as notching the corners and offsetting conflicting bends but it ends up looking unrealistic.

This is a simple example of something I'm trying to model in Fusion 360:

If I try to bend this line at all, it fails with errors cited above.

I have added offsets like below and tried every Bend / Relief / Corner Override I can find.

I followed a tutorial that used flanges to accomplish these types of bends and it does work but it ends up with unnecessary gaps and not very representative of the material and shape to be manufactured.

I'll attach the Fusion file I've been working with in case anyone has any ideas or tips.  

Appreciated,

Mark

This was the first 

Solved! Go to Solution.

Thanks for your reply.   My goal is to understand what design tools are used by paper product manufacturers.  

Want more information on Metalized Paper? Feel free to contact us.

I expect organizations such Coca Cola, UPS and Amazon design their packaging with precision using CAD tools.  It would interesting to learn if they accomplish this with Fusion 360?  If so, are there configurations, rules, or best practices they utilize for industrial paper product manufacturing, that I can use too?  I was wondering if this type of design work is already being done and if the community had suggestions on how to configure the environment to support paper manufacturing design.  

I found one example of a designer that created an additional sheet metal rule based on the specifics of cardboard.  It's included in the attached file.  I created an additional sheet metal rule to reduce the thickness of the material from .067" (cardboard) to .38mm (cardstock).  These updates help but I'm unsure if these or even sheet metal in general is the best method.  Another suggestion I learned was to use the surface workflow with the ruled surface feature, which is not constrained by the bend limitations.

In summary, I'm hoping to hear any community opinions, suggestions or experience withFusion 360 used for paper manufacturing.

Appreciated,

Mark

In case anyone encounters a similar problem, this is how I (with help from an experienced colleague) resolved the problem(s). 

My workflow had been:

1. Create sheet metal component
2. Create sketch to design the flat base of the part
3. Extrude that body to cardstock thickness
4. Convert to sheet metal (unsure why this was needed) 
5. Create sketch with bend lines defined
6. Create bends, generate errors

Functioning workflow:

1. Create a sheet metal component
2. Create sketch to design the entire part, including bend lines
3. Use the flange feature to thicken/extrude the face to cardstock thickness (.38mm)
4. Use the bend feature to bend the hinges up off the surface plane.
5. Create sketches on the new bent short edges
6. Use the bend feature to bend inward the 2 short edge triangles.
7. No errors. Unsure why this works and the previous fails.

A few other items that may help others:

1. The physical material I used to represent cardboard and kraft cardstock is bamboo. There are some wood materials that are close also.
2. I still needed to create a small offset at the corner as described in the original post, figure 2.
3. You'll probably want to create and save the width of the paper product as a new sheet metal rule to your library so you'll  have it available for other projects:

I think this gets me most of what I need to design for paper manufacturing.  I'd still be interested to learn what the professionals use in the food packaging and shipping industries to design boxes, in case anyone knows.   I should have posted this in the Fusion 360 Design, Validate & Document forum or perhaps the Fusion 360 Manufacture forum since this is more of a usage question than a bug report.

Laminating (LOM) is one of the first additive manufacturing techniques created and uses a variety of sheet material, namely paper. Benefits include the use of A4 paper, which is readily available and inexpensive, as well as a relatively simple and inexpensive setup, when compared to others.

The Ultrasonic Additive Manufacturing (UAM) process uses sheets of metal, which are bound together using ultrasonic welding. The process does require additional CNC machining of the unbound metal. Unlike LOM, the metal cannot be easily removed by hand and unwanted material must be removed by machining. Material saving metallic tape of 0.150mm thick and 25mm wide does however, result in less material to cut off afterwards. Milling can happen after each layer is added or after the entire process. Metals used include aluminium, copper, stainless steel and titanium. The process is low temperature and allows for internal geometries to be created. One key advantage is that the process can bond different materials and requires relatively little energy as the metal is not melted, instead using a combination of ultrasonic frequency and pressure (The Engineer, ). Overhangins can be built and main advantage of embedding electronics and wiring (Karunakaran et al., ). Materials are bonded and helped by plastic deformation of the metals. Plastic deformation allows more contact between surface and backs up existing bonds (Janaki Ram et al., ).

Post processing requires the extraction of the part from the surrounding sheet material. With LOM, cross hatching is used to make this process easier, but as paper is used, the process does not require any specialist tools and is time efficient. Whilst the structural quality of parts is limited, adding adhesive, paint and sanding can improve the appearance, as well as further machining.

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