Thickness Parameters and Converting Inventor Parts to Sheetmetal

By Shaun Griffith

Sheet metal parts have a series of parameters built in to control the sheet metal defaults. One of which is the “Thickness” parameter. This controls the material thickness of the sheet metal part. However, the value is also used to drive a series of other parameters as can be seen below.

These parameters can be adjusted to suit your needs within the sheet metal defaults, but as a standard, are consistently driven by the Thickness.

However, if you decide to build your design as a standard inventor part then convert it to sheet metal, having a parameter called Thickness prior to conversion, enforces a change among the default parameters.

In this example I have built a part and shelled it with a user parameter called “Thickness” to define the shell Thickness. It is a common assumption that this will replace the Thickness parameter within the sheet metal defaults when converted.

However, when I then convert to sheet metal, the default sheet metal parameter becomes “Thickness_1” and replaces “Thickness” within the equations for the other predefined parameters.

You can still drive the “Thickness_1” parameter with the “Thickness” parameter within the defaults.

However, it may start to get confusing to use, so it may be easier to use a different parameter name before converting, such as below.