Hi All,

I designed a pressure vessel and its shell consists of several strakes joined at the seam. I'm trying to use multibody sheet metal functionality so I can create a cut list and flat patterns for laser cutting. I created the vessel by extruding sketch and then splitting it along seams to create a multibody part. When I try to convert it to a sheet metal part it doesn't work. I used Insert Bends and  I get rebuild error "Multiple bodies not supported for this feature" and "One or more bends could not be processed". I created the same part using extrudes and I created a multibody sheet metal part without any problems. I've attached two simplified version of my vessel, one created with two thin extrudes and the other created with split feature.

I also have some round reinforcing pads on the vessel and I would like to use sheet metal functionality to create them. For rectangular reinforcing pads it is simple but for round ones I'm struggling to find a simple solution. I've read this thread :

https://forum.solidworks.com/message/241880#241880

but the solution seems too complicated if you have a few pads and the flat pattern should be perfectly round. Also I would like to do it as a multibody part not assembly.

I haven't' done a lot of complex sheet metal modeling but I'm familiar with basic techniques. Bending a round plate should be a simple task. However it seems that it is not that simple at all.

I would also be really interested to see other people thoughts on how to best approach modeling pressure vessels. So far in my company we used assemblies for everything but most of BOMs and Cut Lists are not automated.

I use SW2011 at work.

Cheers