- [Instructor] Forming tools allow us to add in
custom form shapes into sheet metal.
We can add in ribs, louvers, card guides,
embosses, debosses, and the list keeps going.
Generally forming tools are custom.
However, quite a few standard shapes are available
at most manufacturers.
Now SolidWorks has some off-the-shelf louvers and ribs
and things like that we can automatically add,
that are pre-loaded into the Design Library.
And those are available right over here on the Library.
If you want to bring this out,
you can click on the little push pin,
it will stay out.
And down here you can see
there's a folder called Forming tools.
Inside of there is embosses, extruded flanges,
lances, louvers, and ribs.
So we have a whole bunch of pre-made ones
that we can use in our designs.
And we can also create our own custom ones as well.
But for right now let's go ahead and click on embosses.
And let's go ahead and just drag out a circular emboss.
There it is.
I can flip the tool so it's going up,
or flip it so it's going down.
I can add a couple of other modifications here.
But it's pretty much just drag and drop.
Now go over here to Position,
and let's go ahead and click on the Dimensional tool.
And let's dimension from the center point
up here to an edge.
Give it a three inches.
And from this edge over here,
let's go down to that center point and type in four inches.
And now we've located that feature.
Click on okay, click okay, and there it is.
If you want to add more,
we can always go back to that feature.
Edit the feature.
Go over here to Position and just grab that point command.
And anywhere you place a point,
it's going to automatically add one of those embosses.
Now of course we can dimension those as well,
or just go ahead and click on the green check mark
and we've added those to our part.
We can also add other features to other faces.
So in this case here I'm gonna add a louver.
Right here's our louver,
so go ahead and drag it onto the surface right here.
Make sure it's going in the right direction.
So I'm going to flip it over
so it's going in that direction there.
And my position, let's go ahead and
add a couple of dimensions here.
So grab the Dimensioning tool,
and from the center point up to the top, make it two inches.
And from here over, so let's grab the point to there.
One more time, there it is point.
Alright, and one inch from there.
There is our first louver.
Now of course you could add more,
or you can do something like a linear pattern.
So go to Features, come up here to Linear Pattern.
I'm gonna choose my direction, which is this direction here.
And what I'd like to pattern,
my feature to pattern right here is gonna be that louver.
So there it is, let's add a few more.
Oh that's direction too.
Sorry.
Right over here is the spacing
and how many you'd like to place across your part.
And there we have it.
Alright, so very easily able to add some custom forming
tools or actually off-the-shelf forming tools to our part.
If we had a custom forming tool
we'd do exactly the same thing.
And of course you can pattern forming tools
just like you could any other feature inside of SolidWorks.