Hello sheet metal experts !

A while ago I thought I had a brilliant idea to model a curved sheet metal shield with a rolled edge flange. See the picture. Now that the project is done (had to design a 180 degree turn conveyor with modular plastic belt in it) I must say the idea was costly. The flex feature eats up computer resources very fast with 8 of these curved side panels in the assembly. Rebuilding etc. Takes time. See the statistics. The positive side was the use of a config for the flat pattern with a suppressed flex feature. That worked well.

Also creating in-context holes to mount connecting bars to could not be done to the flexed shape, so I had to put these holes in the blank before flexing and then tweak to find the correct position for such holes in the assembly.

Conclusion: I don't think I will use flex for this kind of design tasks again soon.

So the question is: who knows a better way to model these shields with rolled edge. Side info: production rolls the edge flange with forming rollers to the blank first and then flexes the panel into the radius.

Ofcoarse generating the flat pattern (with flattened edge flange as well) is still the objective.