Bending solids

[ppc]

Hello everybody,

I have modelled gun parts as part of our project, which is the creation of a hunting rifle from scratch. These parts will be machined, then finished and put together in the traditional gunsmithing way.

The parts I have a problem with are the upper and lower tangs (the bits that link the stock to the rest of the rifle: typically, they are machined straight, then the gunsmith bends them with a hammer to make them curve down and follow the curvature of the stock. They're not machined with the curvature because (1) it would be way to complicated and (2) it depends on the shape of the stock. After the hammering process, the gunsmith has to mount and hand-adjust other parts to the (now bent) tangs, which means that no two gun parts are the same.

So my problem is this: I must model the rough forms of the parts that will be machined, then trimmed down and adjusted by the gunsmith onto the bent tangs, but the tangs I have modelled in AutoCAD are straight, so I need to bend them virtually in AutoCAD to an average curvature, so I can have an fair idea of the overall sizes of these parts.

Is there a way to bend solids in AutoCAD along a path? or "warp" the 3D space around them? if I can't do it, I'm planning on slicing the tangs in several segments, rotating the segments one by one, then reassemble them all together to form something close to what I want, but it's not exactly ideal of course.

[Spacepig]

Hi PPC

There's no way to bend a solid in Autocad (it's not a parametric solid as in 3d max). The only way I can think of doing it is to trim the tangs back to the part where they start to bend, create a profile of the tang on the trimmed end of the straight part, them REVOLVE it about a sitable axis to create the bent profile. When you've trimmerd the revolved surface to suit you can union the straight and bent parts together to form a single solid.

All the best

Spacepig