Advance Steel Folded Plates – A Christmas Present From Graitec

Advance Steel has some excellent functions for creating folded plates, the way that the plate is created can influence the drawing output, this blog will guide you through some of the tips and tricks when creating folded plates.

1. UCS Orientation – When modelling the individual plates before folding it is important to ensure the Z axis is positioned correctly, for all other elements in Advance Steel we can override the detailing direction if we need to but with folded plates you cannot override this.

Ensure the Z axis is pointing vertically so the folded plate is detailed from the top looking down.

2. Folded plate main object – When folding your plates, the first plate that you click becomes the main object of the folded plate, all the other plates are folded from the main object. On your fabrication details this is what drives the description of the fold such as up 90 or down 90. You can check the main object by going to a wireframe visual style, the main object of the folded plate is shown as the cross including a circle.

3. If you have folded the plates in the wrong order you can override the folded plate main object by using the “Set folded Plate Main Object”.

4. There is a command that will check if your folded plate can be unfolded, this wont check that your tooling can do the folding just that there are no modelling errors with your folded plate. The command line will tell you if the plate can be unfolded then there is an option to display the unfolded representation, this will show you what the folded plate will look like unfolded.

Take a look at our Christmas themed video tutorial for some more Folded Plates tips and tricks:

If you are looking for extra functionality for your Structural workflows, the Graitec PowerPack for Advance Steel contains powerful functionality.