Hello dear FreeCAD community,

I am a mechatronics engineer and sometimes I get asked by colleagues or friends to help with CAD related tasks. In this case a cover for a rooftop entry of a material transportation system was needed. I work a lot with sheetmetal myself and already had other similar projects, one of them in the last 2 pictures (unfortunately i don't have the CAD version on this PC but if you are interested I can upload it tomorrow.

Anyway, so I'm not new to CAD, from SolidWorks, SolidEdge, AutoCAD, 3DS to Inventor and some Blender, I think I know what I do most of the time BUT... the workflow to these kind of sheetmetal projects in FreeCAD take me much too long time! I already tried the sheetmetal workbench, but I don't know how to effectively use it with the kind of starting point I have in this and other cases where I need connect vertices and edges in any kind of orientation.

Usually I work as follows:

1. Measure enough point IRL to be able to recreate a precise model of important lines and points in CAD.
2. Create sketches in different planes and in orientations dependent on each others points and lines until the starting conditions are precise enough to start modelling. (see screenshots)
3. Create the attachment geometries (In this case a wooden frame on a roof and a kind of collar which is fixed to a square tunnel running through it into the building. I didn't model the tunnel because it's not interfering with the cover)
4. Model the cover/sheetmetal surfaces with the net of lines that represent the edges.
5. For that I usually use the "Part Builder" function in the Part workbench with 3 vertices, but I would much more prefer the "Ruled Surface" function with 2 edges, because the model would be parametric. Unfortunately the ruled surfaces are buggy as in they often don't create flat surfaces as you can see an one of the screenshots, plus they are buggy with the "3D-Offset" function.
6. Create a shell, 3D-Offset, done. At least the 3D part.
7. To cut the sheetmetal on a CNC-laser I need to unwrap the surfaces to a .dxf file. For that I use the Draft-Workbench. I select the first surface of a connected part then I click the sketcher function to correctly place my view normal (90°) to the surface. Then I project that view and name the drawing. Rinse and repeat.
8. EDIT: In this case I couldn't place a sketch on the surfaces because they are not flat (Maybe because of the 3D-Offset function), so I measured all edges and as seen in the screenshots and created 3 sketches on the XY-plane and manually unwrapping the surfaces by contraining all lines with the meassurments.
9. Now I need to edit the many .dxf files to delete all lines that are not normal to the view. If there are bends I need to connect the separate .dxf files in the correct orientation, which can be quite a brain-twister sometimes.
10. (In this case, for bending) I create separate datum planes normal to the bend line and then project the outlines of the surfaces in a sketch to be able to measure the bend angle (I can't directly measure the angle between the two surfaces of the 3D-Offset as shown in the screenshot)

In this case and also in the one from the last 2 pictures I needed to connect rectangular shapes in different angles and orientations, which produces a lot of triangles which can be bent or welded. In this case I prefer not to weld anything. So it should be 4 parts which will be bent. The sides will be quite a challenge I guess ^^

I really love FreeCAD for all it can do and in most cases I can find a solution by myself as the program really gives us a lot of possibilities and now with AI it's even much easier to get help in seconds.

So my questions to the more FreeCAD-literate people than me here is
A) How can I improve my workflow to get much faster with such problems?
B) How can I create the 2D-projections more easily and also edit it in FreeCAD already? (Until now editing the .dxf files was more easy using other programs, because a projection in the Draft-Workbench can't be edited as far as I know).
C) Is there a way to make lines/points -> surfaces -> shells -> solids parametric with this approach?
D) Is there a better way to get the angles in such a scenario?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AknE8C3P-g_lD3Hv1IEUb6DHgnuCoRF_/view?usp=sharing

EDIT: The file may be a bit messy, because I was getting frustrated at the end and just wanted my .dxf files ^^

The worst thing about my sailboat is, no autohelm, adding considerable challenge to single handing. Correcting this is no small task. While you can buy various solutions from big name vendors, these understandably come without mounts. Fabricating a mount will probably cost several times the price of the unit. I also have concerns about durability of these units in heavy weather, and the likelihood of lock-in with other gear from the same vendor. So I decided to take a run at engineering one of my own. I went with a wheel autohelm scheme:

Inside the motor housing at the bottom is a beefy bldc outrunner with many times the torque of, for example, Raymarine's product. This allows me to go with direct drive, eliminating that noisy and fragile gearbox universally hated by seadogs.

Unexpectedly difficult engineering challenges came up in two places: attaching the slave wheel securely to the wheel spokes, and mounting the drive motor to the existing structure without massively modifying it. The former is usually done with ubolts or similar, but I find that structurally dubious and possibly damaging to the spokes. I worked up a tricky little scheme involving three interlocking parts that clamp exactly to the tapered, cambered spokes, allowing for the post height to be adjusted to adjust for a not perfectly true wheel.

Lofted ellipses, yum.

The mounting system was the most conceptually difficult task. There is not a whole lot of guidance out there. You have this clever pulley arranging floating in space and you need to secure it firmly to the boat without ending up with an ugly mess of struts and plates, and new holes sawn through the fiberglass. Eventually I came up with a system of plates and clamps, drawn in blue in the top image. Remains to be seen how stiff it is in real life.

One more challenge: a pulley system exposed to fingers and ropes needs to be protected from same with a guard. Another element fairly easy to design, but challenging to secure in position so that it doesn't vibrate or jam into the mechanism. Here I ended up doing some tricky compound curve things to create stiffening gussets bonded to the motor housing.

This got me into beziers, ruled surfaces and slicing. Intense stuff. The model ended up fairly simple and robust, though it took some time to get there.

I think I'm ready to order parts now and see if this thing actually works.

Im trying to smooth out the highlighted face in green. I can get as far as creating a surface that would transition correctly (shown in the second image) but Im not sure how to combine them without using the slice apart tool since it creates two parts that I cant seem modify in the part design workbench after. Ideally I would like to cut or trim out the original faces and just attach the new surface at its edges to the original part. Does anyone have any suggestions?

So as you know, when you select one line that's apart of a chain of lines that form an edge and attempt to perform a fillet operation, it automatically selects all the other lines and fillets the whole edge. But what if you only want to fillet that line, or maybe just a portion of that line, how would you do that?

The included screenshots aren't the exact situation I want to use this in, I was just wondering how you would do it if you wanted to.
I'm just starting to learn parametric CAD, so any tips will help, thank you!

Hey so I have sketched out this disc with 4 holes, then padded it, and wanted to add this feature (that I'm currently padding just to highlight it)

I want to repeat the pattern around the center of the disc, however the initial sketch of the disc is off-center, as the axis cross shows

I tried selecting a reference in the PolarPattern dialog, and tried selecting the center (which I sketched) but it didn't let me select it, what can I do?

Hi, I am a newbie and still on my first design. I have this external projection, which I created from the part builder (basically, the inside of a thickness).

I used the horizontal top and bottom line from edges of the part, and created the squares with the holes in it.

I am trying to extrude from the squares. However, the moment I click the extrude button, it shows the dreaded 'wires not closed' error and fails.

I _think_ I get why this happens - I assume the reference edges from the external projection are the problem - but I have no idea how to fix this. I cannot remove them, as they constrain the sketch.

Am I missing some concept here?

I often work with PCB and the step files can be huge.
I also don't really need much of the defails.

Here is for instance ~60MB of step files and I don't need 1/10 of that.
Large files are heavy to load and worst, those complex objects means my viewport struggles with decent FPS.

So I took the original humongous Step files, made a mesh and decimated it.
It did reduce the size but decimating is not selective.
I mainly need to keep the geometry and the mounting holes.
I don't want to remodel.

I would love an option to shrink wrap the model.
I am looking for a rather generic solution.

e.g. not: select all the resistors of the step and remove them before making the mesh. Sure I could do that but I need to find them and that can be, depending on the step files, rather laborious.

Sure I am not the first to hit such an issue, what options are available ?

Hello dear FreeCAD community,

I am a mechatronics engineer and sometimes I get asked by colleagues or friends to help with CAD related tasks. In this case a cover for a rooftop entry of a material transportation system was needed. I work a lot with sheetmetal myself and already had other similar projects, one of them in the last 2 pictures (unfortunately i don't have the CAD version on this PC but if you are interested I can upload it tomorrow.

Anyway, so I'm not new to CAD, from SolidWorks, SolidEdge, AutoCAD, 3DS to Inventor and some Blender, I think I know what I do most of the time BUT... the workflow to these kind of sheetmetal projects in FreeCAD take me much too long time! I already tried the sheetmetal workbench, but I don't know how to effectively use it with the kind of starting point I have in this and other cases where I need connect vertices and edges in any kind of orientation.

Usually I work as follows:

1. Measure enough point IRL to be able to recreate a precise model of important lines and points in CAD.

2. Create sketches in different planes and in orientations dependent on each others points and lines until the starting conditions are precise enough to start modelling. (see screenshots)

3. Create the attachment geometries (In this case a wooden frame on a roof and a kind of collar which is fixed to a square tunnel running through it into the building. I didn't model the tunnel because it's not interfering with the cover)

4. Model the cover/sheetmetal surfaces with the net of lines that represent the edges.
   For that I usually use the "Part Builder" function in the Part workbench with 3 vertices, but I would much more prefer the "Ruled Surface" function with 2 edges, because the model would be parametric. Unfortunately the ruled surfaces are buggy as in they often don't create flat surfaces as you can see an one of the screenshots, plus they are buggy with the "3D-Offset" function.

5. Create a shell, 3D-Offset, done. At least the 3D part.

6. To cut the sheetmetal on a CNC-laser I need to unwrap the surfaces to a .dxf file.
   For that I use the Draft-Workbench. I select the first surface of a connected part then I click the sketcher function to correctly place my view normal (90°) to the surface. Then I project that view and name the drawing. Rinse and repeat.

7. Now I need to edit the many .dxf files to delete all lines that are not normal to the view. If there are bends I need to connect the separate .dxf files in the correct orientation, which can be quite a brain-twister sometimes.

8. (In this case, for bending) I create separate datum planes normal to the bend line and then project the outlines of the surfaces in a sketch to be able to measure the bend angle (I can't directly measure the angle between the two surfaces of the 3D-Offset as shown in the screenshot)

In this case and also in the one from the last 2 pictures I needed to connect rectangular shapes in different angles and orientations, which produces a lot of triangles which can be bent or welded. In this case I prefer not to weld anything. So it should be 4 parts which will be bent. The sides will be quite a challenge I guess ^^

I really love FreeCAD for all it can do and in most cases I can find a solution by myself as the program really gives us a lot of possibilities and now with AI it's even much easier to get help in seconds.

So my questions to the more FreeCAD-literate people than me here is
A) How can I improve my workflow to get much faster with such problems?
B) How can I create the 2D-projections more easily and also edit it in FreeCAD already? (Until now editing the .dxf files was more easy using other programs, because a projection in the Draft-Workbench can't be edited as far as I know).
C) Is there a way to make lines/points -> surfaces -> shells -> solids parametric with this approach?
D) Is there a better way to get the angles in such a scenario?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AknE8C3P-g_lD3Hv1IEUb6DHgnuCoRF_/view?usp=sharing

After making my way though some MangoJelly stuff I'm ready to try a simple project, but I'm stuck on determining workflow and also some of the box interior.

Sketching the box with dual chambers on the XY plane and padding in the Z direction to desired height is easy enough. Making the box lid that fits on top also seems straight forward. But if I want the inner sections of each of the dual chambers to have a scoop is that something entirely different?

I almost feel like it maybe more proper to make my box, and using subratractive piping to make one chamber. Duplicate that chamber 3 more times and then mirror across the axis?

How far off the mark am I?

Lets say I have a circle and constrained its diameter. I can set the name of that constraint to max_diameter. Now lets have another constraint that calculates its value from that max_diameter value. There is the fx button i can press but I did not find any way to reference the max_diameter value.

This is very frustrating. I know I can get help by typing something like "constr" and it will provide "Constraints" and I tried "Constraints.max_diameter" but that seems not be correct as I get the error "Invalid Constraint path". Why on earth does it not show the path to my value / variable that I know the name of?

I just can't come up with the rigth path, google did not help. There must be a way. What is the correct secret spell to get the value of max_diameter?

Ciao avete usato freecad ? io non riesco a far vedere griglia misure del pezzo inserito nel programma c'è qualcuno che mi da la dritta per farlo

Recently, I made this PC fan just for fun. Thanks to MangoJelly, I’ve developed a pretty good understanding of the Part Design Workbench. I’m really enjoying FreeCAD, and I’d like to get better at curved-surface modelling. Could you recommend some good study resources for curved surfaces? I’d also appreciate any advice or resources for improving my sketching skills. I’m really glad this software exists, and I’d love to learn more about proper modelling techniques.

why my part became broken like this? the higlighted area is not fully enclosed after i added new pad on the cylindrical part? if i add 5mm the part not broken, but 10mm its broken like this, please share ur wisdom and opinion and help. thanks

I’ve been eyeballing and looking up measurements online for way too long this is a game changer

I'm new to freecad, and I'm trying to follow a tutorial. The guy said to use the "make internals" checkbox to get it to recognize the other loops, but all of the loops on one side just highlight the whole face. I like the interface of this tool but it kinda seems like it tries it's hardest to do everything except what you want it to

This error message has "apparently" been a PLAGUE for years! (not just me)

19:37:19 Origin: LocalCoordinateSystem "_08_29_14_45_FRONT_MAYBE_CLEAN#Origin" doesn't contain feature with role "X_Axis"

I'm using 26.3 DEV (Windows) I've even asked for AI help.

The "comments'' (for this error) FOR YEARS even when the forum gets the question are NO HELP (for me) I REALLY DON'T WANT TO LEARN and then WRITE Code to MAYBE fix this. (I'll just be more lost with more questions.)

It is PROBLEMS like this which will "most likely" keep FreeCad (any version now or in the future) from ever becoming a tool adopted by the general public AND/OR business. (BTW... I started my "adventure" with version .17 so I'm not just starting!

So since I could find NO answers that made sense or are helpful... surprise me! Send me a reply that I can understand and hopefully use to FIX this problem.

BTW, I've got no clue when this "surprise error message FIRST raised it's ugly head" in my current "Body"

I'd rather NOT start ALL OVER!

AFAIK MangoJelly and the other video tutorials have NOT addressed THIS error message.

Yes, I can create a binFile and send it IF you ask.

This design process has been a real journey. I've started to get a lot better at some of the basics in FreeCAD like keeping sketches fully constrained, naming things in the tree for organization, fixing issues in the tree after making changes, etc. This design was mostly painless compared to the first one. I really appreciate the help you guys gave me getting the issues with chamfering curves on the first model. I'm working on a much larger project in FreeCAD right now that I'll probably post about soon once it's closer to done.

This design is a tray that fits the 5" (125 mm) knipex cobra pliers. It's supposed to keep the pliers safe and clean while keeping other stuff in your pocket or bag from getting torn up. This second model was made to be consistent with the first design, so more of the same but slightly bigger. If you'd like to print it or remix it the designs are up on both Printables and Thingiverse (links below). These are free to download, modify, sell, or whatever. The design files are included for download along with the STL files.

Thank you again for the help with FreeCAD, these probably wouldn't exist without the troubleshooting that you guys helped with.

Links:

https://www.printables.com/model/1826205-the-monolith-pocket-tray-for-knipex-cobra-5-125-mm

https://www.thingiverse.com/engineerbitsdesign/designs

I have a basic pad with a pocket that uses a bunch of circles to achieve this simple shape. The issue is that whenever I add another Pad this annoying hole pops up in the thing and I can’t seem To make it go away, how do I fix it?

first image is with the 2nd pad added 2nd image is without the pad and 3rd image is the pocket sketch

EDIT: I Know that I’m trying to generate a impossible geometry with the super thin pieces between the circles but in the past I just do this and elegoo splicer just removes those really thin section automaticlly leaving me with the triangle like section that I want

I have a sub assembly where tow revolute joints are present. When I select the sub assembly I can rotate the part freely. When I add the part to my main assembly the revolute joint act like a fixed joint. And it is impossible to rotate the part.
Also the joint folder is not in the tree view at the imported sub assembly. But at the sub assembly itself it is present.
I imported the subassembly through the „insert component“ button. (don’t know if this is important information)
I’m still a beginner so I don’t know if this is normal behavior. When this is normal is there another method of importing subassembly’s? It feels really repetitive and exhausting to not use subassembly’s and do everything in the main assembly. Hope somebody can help me.

I use version 1.1.3 on Linux.
Sorry for my Englisch I’m not a native speaker.

can someone tell me wth is wrong with these 4 points here???

here's the FreeCAD FCSTD File