Yesterday I struggled with a project certainly due to my lack of familiarity with SW. Anyway my task was to design a roof chimney support bracket made from a 24"x 24" piece of .050 thk stainless steel. The idea was to put 2, 1" flanges for mounting to the roof and put a 90deg bend diagonally across the material. In the end I kind of "faked it" and as you can see from the attached photo got it to work. My main problem area was finding the best way to locate the sheet metal bracket against the chimnety pipe so I could use the cut/extrude command to get the correct "notch" for around the chimney.

How I went about it:

1. I created the roof profile and chimney.

2. I created a 23" x 23" flat piece of sheetmetal on the roof surface rotating the sketch 45 deg. before I extruded it.

3. I used sketch bed to make a 90 deg. diagonal bend across the metal.

4. Now came the problem. How to Rotate/Move this piece of metal so that the correct edges would be laying against the roof surface.

5. In the end I used the rotate command from the side and front views, rotaing the part in a single axis till it "looked right".

6. Then I added 1" edge flanges, guessing on the bend angle until it "looked right".

Is there an easier , more precise way of moving/rotaing a body such as the one I created?