docs / workbenches / Sheet Metal Workbench

Sheet Metal Workbench

Id: sheetMetal · Third entry in the workbench dropdown

Sheet Metal is for parts built as a folded sheet: a root flat, flanges and hems bent off it, corner breaks, and cutouts — all carried in a sheet-metal tree that can be unfolded into a flat pattern and exported as DXF or SVG.

It offers every SM.* feature plus Sketch, Datium and Plane, because a sheet part still starts from a sketch on a datum.

When to switch to it

You are starting a folded sheet part: switch here, sketch the flat outline, then Sheet Metal Tab to seed the tree.
You want the flat-pattern export button on the toolbar.
You want the palette trimmed to the sheet-metal operations so you are not scrolling past thirty modeling features.

If you need a modeling feature on a sheet part — a Boolean cut, a plain Fillet, a Hole — switch to All, which offers everything and still carries the flat-pattern button.

Panels

Sheet Metal claims no panels, so it shows the same unclaimed set as Modeling.

Flat-pattern export

Its one toolbar button, Export flat pattern (DXF / SVG) (sheetmetal.flat_pattern, always offered), opens the export modal in its flat-pattern mode. All carries it too.

The export runs the unfold transiently off the target body's resident sheet-metal tree: no feature is added and the history is not modified. The target body is the selected sheet-metal body when the selection names exactly one, otherwise the sole sheet-metal body in the part.

Two failure messages are worth knowing, both surfaced on the status line and as a toast:

no sheet-metal body in the part — the part carries no sheet-metal tree at all.
several sheet-metal bodies in the part — select the one to export — disambiguate by selecting the body you want first.

Features (11)

The shared building blocks — a sheet part starts here.

Feature	Code
Datium	`D`	A reference triad of orthogonal `XY` / `XZ` / `YZ` planes
Plane	`P`	One named construction plane to sketch on
Sketch	`S`	The closed outline the root flat is derived from

The sheet-metal operations

Feature	Code
Sheet Metal Tab	`SM.TAB`	Seeds the sheet-metal tree from a closed profile: thickness, placement, default bend radius and k-factor
Sheet Metal Flange	`SM.F`	Bends a new flat off a chosen edge of an existing flat
Sheet Metal Contour Flange	`SM.CF`	Builds a base sheet-metal tree from an open path, swept out to a strip width
Sheet Metal Hem	`SM.HEM`	Folds an edge back on itself — the flange pipeline at a fixed 180°
Sheet Metal Closed Corner	`SM.CLOSED_CORNER`	Closes adjacent flange ends with overlap, gap and optional relief
Sheet Metal Mirror	`SM.MIRROR`	Mirrors the whole part; about a plate side wall it joins into one part with one flat pattern
Sheet Metal Corner Fillet	`SM.FILLET`	Rounds a plate outline corner with a tangent arc
Sheet Metal Corner Chamfer	`SM.CHAMFER`	Bevels a plate outline corner, distance-distance
Sheet Metal Cutout	`SM.CUTOUT`	Cuts a sketched opening through a flat, tracked in the tree so it unfolds

The two outline-corner treatments are not the general Fillet and Chamfer: those are rolling-ball edge blends on a solid, while the sheet-metal pair edits the flat's 2D outline so the break is present in both the folded solid and the flat pattern.

Limitations to expect

Corner fillet and chamfer are convex, straight-segment, single-flat corners only, and the chamfer is symmetric distance-distance. Their pages state the exact refusals.
Flat-pattern export handles one body per export.