Dies and tools for fabricating base plate

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Now that we've considered all of the components in this assembly for manufacturing and we've made adjustments to those pieces, it's time to make the dies and tools that are required in order to actually fabricate those pieces. Before we get started, I'm going to really quickly make a new folder here to store the parts that we previously made. And I'm just going to call this our arm. And I'm going to move this into our fabricated parts.

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I'm also going to add in our arm components, and that's gonna help us just keep things a little bit cleaner, a little bit easier to show and hide. I'm also going to hide these other components that I don't currently need, and we can just focus on one part at a time. So we're gonna take a look at our bass plate, and the first thing I wanna do is

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make a reference plane that's going to help us sketch out some of the major dimensions that we care about. So I'm going to add a plane to the bottom.

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and I'm going to start sketching on that plane.

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This part is fabricated by pressing a metal die or a plastic die into a sheet of material that then deforms that sheet into the base plate. So we're gonna make a die and then we're gonna make a template that's gonna help us finalize the shape and place all of the holes. Because we're pressing this part out of sheet metal, we're going to make a die and use a sheet of material that's larger than the finished part that we're going for. So using the

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sketch entities that have popped up as a result of making our plane. I'm just going to draw a line to find the center point of our part. And I'm going to then make a rectangle that's a center point rectangle that allows us to make a

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which allows us to center this rectangle. And we're just going to set some major dimensions here. We're going to choose 130.

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And we're going to choose 230 here.

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I'm going to use this sketch to help define the size of the die. And right now I'm going to select our part and I'm just going to hide this to get it out of the way. I'm going to extrude this surface upwards and just give it a 50 millimeter thickness. And I'm also going to drop this surface down here, give it an extra 20 millimeters. So for a total of 70.

02:47

And with that, I now have a block that encompasses our base plate. And what I'm going to do is subtract that base plate from the inside of this block by double clicking on our block, subtract, and then selecting our base plate. And you can see that we have a minus sign for our base plate and a plus sign for our block. I'm going to make sure that we're going to keep our removed bodies. And then I'm going to select check.

03:15

So what does that mean? We have now a pocket that's inside of this block that's representative of our base plate, and we have managed to keep the base plate as well in the overall assembly. Now that we have a pocket that's inside of this block along with our base plate, I'm gonna hide our base plate so we don't affect it at all. And I'm also going to start breaking this block down into multiple pieces so that we can fabricate the block. First thing I'm gonna do is select the block.

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and I'm going to go to Split Body. I'm going to select our plane and that's going to cut our block in half. So I'm going to click Done here. So this is our first part. I'm going to move this block out of the way and you'll see that we have some witness marks here of the subtraction. And we need to get a couple more pieces out of this. So what I'm going to do here is just give

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And I'm also going to turn our base plate back on. And I'm going to momentarily hide this upper body here. I want to split off the section that is currently inside of this depression here by using another plane. So I'm going to click that top surface there. And I'm going to add a plane.

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to bring back the top block and double click on that to select it and select this upper plane now and use that to split the body again. So now we have multiple pieces here. And I'm going to select both of these sections that just got created. And we're going to move those out of the way. Again, nice round number. I'm going to hide this bass plate so it's no longer in our way. I'm also going to hide these two planes.

05:15

And what I want to do now is I want to get this part here to match back up with this bottom die. So if I look at the movement rotation that's here for this bottom die, I can select additional target bodies. One of the challenges is that we made this movement rotation early on while we were cutting this die apart. So I can't actually get to that. That other part doesn't exist. So I am going to first change the

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or the order of the movement rotations that we have. And I'm gonna just slide this to the end of the history list. And what that's gonna allow me to do is that when I select this target body now, it will move the bottom die back into position and it will allow me to select additional target bodies. So I can select those two pieces there and I can click check. And now everything moved together.

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There's these two extra little pins here that are not necessary, so we're just going to delete those.

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And the next thing that we're going to do is reconnect these two pieces because we split the body originally. I'm going to double click on both of these bodies. I'm going to select Union and then click Done. And now this whole assembly is one piece. And that makes our bottom die. We also need to combine the two sections of the top die. So I'm going to shift double click on both of those. I'm going to click Union. Check. And now that's also one piece.

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There's something to be careful of here, and because we subtracted the base plate from the top die, there's actually an extra lip here that we need to relieve. We need to actually make enough space for that sheet material to sit between this surface and this surface when the dies come together. So I'm just going to move this up a little bit to make it match up with the other face. And so you can see that this number changed from...

07:18

50 to 49, our base plate is one millimeter thick, so we know that that moved correctly. With the top die and bottom die reassembled, the only thing that's left is to do a little bit of cleanup on this bottom die. From the original Boolean subtraction, we have these leftover hole spaces that are from the original plate. So what I'm gonna do is just click into the front view here and do a really simple selection to select all of the elements on that surface and just drag it into the body. And that way that cleans up that surface.

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The other thing that we can do is delete this extra surface, which we don't really need. And that helps us just keep things nice and clean. The die is now complete, and we can move these back into location in order to double check that we have enough space for pressing a sheet of metal. And if we click on one of the components, we can see that we have these movement rotation history items, and I can suppress this one. And it moves that block back into location. I can also do the same thing here.

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click and move, and I can suppress that. And that'll move that into place. And we can actually see that there's a gap here that should measure one millimeter difference. And in fact it is. So everything's working out correctly. And we can move on to the next part, which is the template that's gonna help us find the drill holes and also the profile of the oval bass blade.