Earlier this morning we starting working on the Arm Bracket for the Stapler. If you missed it, You should go back and read about creating the forming tools needed for the Arm Bracket. Now that we have created the forming tools we can move on to creating our sheet metal Arm Bracket.

Making the Sheet Metal Arm Bracket

To make the Arm bracket create a sketch on the Right Plane as shown below. The origin doesn’t necessarily need to be the midpoint of the line, but I like doing it this way.

In the Sheet Metal toolbar select the Base-Flange/Tab button, or click Insert -> Sheet Metal -> Base-Flange from the pull-down menu.

The Base-Flange creates a sheet metal part from a sketched line. In the Base Flange PropertyManager, enter in the parameters as shown below. The D1 value is the length of the base extrusion. The T1 Dimension specifies the material thickness of the created sheet metal part. The radius value specifies the bend radii of the sheet metal part.

On clicking the green check mark, the base feature will be created.

Next, create a new sketch on the top face of the part, per the view below. These are the holes that line up with the base we created a few weeks ago. After creating the sketch, cut extrude the feature through the part. In the PropertyManager, make sure you select Link to Thickness.

Create another sketch that has four rectangles on each corner of the base using Colinear sketch relations and the dimensions shown. Create a cut extrude of the sketch linked to thickness. These four cutouts are to allow the bracket to be able to fit in the part we created two weeks ago.

With the base created, it is now time to create the edge flanges. Click the Edge Flange button on the Sheet Metal toolbar, or select Insert -> Sheet Metal -> Edge Flange.

Click the two longer edges on the base part and drag the flanges to the approximate height shown. At this time the actual height is not important.

On creation, the flanges will appear as below.

In the FeatureManager, edit the first sketch in the Edge-Flange you just created by selecting Edit Sketch in the context toolbar.

By default, the sketch for the flange is a rectangle, as shown below.

Edit the sketch to the dimensions shown below.

After editing the first sketch of the edge flanges, edit the second sketch and use the Convert Entities to copy the first sketch.

The second sketch should look like the image below.

If all went well, the flanges will be updated to the view below.

Almost done, now that the bracket has been created, it is time to add the cut out for the arm rivet. On the outside face on the bracket, where the largest radius is, create a circle with the diameter of .200″.

Create a cut through both flanges with the sketch.

Now it is time to use the forming tools that we created earlier. Drag the Stapler Dimple form tool in the design library directly onto the outside face of the bracket, as shown below.

A dialog box will prompt you to fully define the position of the sketch using dimensions or relations.

For these dimples, make the sketch concentric with the radius of the smaller tab.

Add a dimple to both sides of the bracket. These dimples will come into play later when we build the entire assembly, they are used to keep the arm down.

Lastly, drag the Spring Retainer Form from the Design Library onto the bottom face of the bracket and define the sketch as shown below.

Woo-Hoo! the bracket is now complete.

Since we created the part as a sheet metal part, we can easily flatten the part to send to our sheet metal vendor.

Well there we go, a nice simple sheet metal bracket with two types of form tools. As I mentioned earlier, all of the models used in the design tutorials are available for download. I was asked before, if these models can be used for instruction purpose…of course. Just don’t try to make money from anything you download here. If you didn’t download before, grab the files here: Arm Bracket, Stapler (994).

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