Fabrication-ready sheet metal and weldment design for manufacturers, builders and fabricators. DeWys Engineering designs sheet metal parts, enclosures, frames and structural weldments in SolidWorks, and delivers the flat patterns, cut lists and weld prints your shop needs to build it right the first time. We’ve been designing for West Michigan fabricators and OEMs since 2010.
What We Design
- Sheet metal: enclosures, panels, covers, brackets, chutes, hoppers and machine guarding
- Weldments: machine frames, bases, skids, carts and racks
- Structural steel: mezzanines, platforms, stairs, handrails and jib cranes
- Equipment: ag and heavy equipment components, trailers and material handling
Designed for How Your Shop Builds
A model that looks right in CAD can still be slow or expensive to build. Before we start, we ask how your shop prefers to fabricate and what equipment you run, then design to your standards instead of making you build to someone else’s:
- Tab-and-slot features: parts that locate themselves, cutting fixturing and fit-up time
- Your bend allowances: bend radii and reliefs matched to your press brake and tooling
- Standard material sizes: fewer unique parts, and less welding where a bend will do
- Weld access: joints placed where welders can reach them, with clear weld callouts
What You Receive
- SolidWorks sheet metal and weldment models, with STEP files for any CAD system
- Flat patterns and DXFs for laser, plasma or waterjet cutting
- Cut lists and bills of materials
- Assembly and weld drawings with weld symbols
- Complete print packages ready for quoting and fabrication
Sheet Metal & Weldment Projects
From an Idea to a Food-Safe Prototype: The “Hurricake” Mold
An entrepreneur came to us with an unusual product: a cake pan insert for Gulf Coast bakeries. When a hurricane is about to make landfall, people throw hurricane parties, and taking his cue from the king cakes Louisiana bakeries sell all Carnival season, he wanted a signature “hurricake” baked in the shape of a storm’s spiral.
We designed the insert in food-safe stainless steel as a set of sheet metal strips: an outer ring and curved spiral arms. Each piece is a simple flat blank, and tabs and slots locate every arm in exactly the right place, so the assembly needs no special fixturing. The joints are then welded to lock it together. We sourced the prototype through Bakker Metal Fabrication, delivering flat patterns and a print package ready to cut, form and weld.
Turning Cardboard Templates Into Repeatable CAD: Race Car Chassis
A race car chassis builder made consistent tube frames for asphalt short-track race cars on a large build jig, but the sheet metal interior panels were a different story. Each set was patterned from cardboard templates and rebuilt nearly from scratch on every car, because there was no reliable record of how the last one was made.
We laser scanned an existing chassis and reverse engineered it into a full SolidWorks weldment model, then worked with the builder on several major changes to the frame design. We also modeled the complete sheet metal interior in CAD, every panel fitted to the tube frame, so each one could be cut from a flat pattern and installed the same way on every chassis. The finished frame and panels were assembled into a complete chassis and shipped to the racer building the car.
Structural Platform for an Automated Color-Blending System: Van Hydraulics & Bakker Metal Fabrication
Van Hydraulics was building an automated pigment-dosing system for a plastics processor that custom-colors resin pellets. The processor formulates so many colors that the system needed two levels of pigment hoppers, each level arranged in a ring above the batch station. Each hopper sits on load cells and feeds a vibratory chute, and a PLC meters pigment by weight into a batch of virgin pellets, which is then mixed and extruded into new, correctly colored pellets.
We designed the tower as a structural weldment: the columns, two platform levels, stairs and handrails, and the hopper mounts, all laid out around the batch path. A lift at the base raises the mixing bin from a pit below the floor up into the dosing station and back down, and every hopper, chute and load cell had to line up with it.
Van Hydraulics needed a fabricator who could build a structure this size, so we introduced them to Bakker Metal Fabrication, who built the tower from our print package. It’s a good example of something we do often: connecting the builders and fabricators in our network so a project has the right shop behind it.
Engineered Jib Cranes for Heavy-Part Handling
A manufacturer moving heavy castings between operations wanted to add jib cranes to its lines to take the strain off its people. Each line was in a different part of the building with a different load requirement, so the project became a family of cranes rather than a single design.
We laid out every crane to fit its line and load, then worked with our professional engineering partner to review and stamp each design, certifying it for its rated capacity. The fabricator building the cranes for the OEM received a complete package of cut lists, assembly and weld prints, and a bill of materials, ready to build and install.
Related Services
- Agricultural & heavy equipment design: more fabricated equipment, from dairy machinery to sand-mining components
- Custom automated machine design: machine frames, guarding and robot cells
- 3D scanning & reverse engineering: capturing existing weldments and parts as editable CAD
- Outsourced mechanical engineering: extra design capacity for your engineering team
DeWys Engineering is part of Gambit Works. We’re ISO 9001:2015 certified and ITAR registered.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you work directly with fabricators?
Yes. Many projects come from fabricators whose customers bring a sketch or an idea, and we turn it into a buildable design and print package the shop can quote and build. Larger fabricators with their own engineers also use us for overflow when their team can’t keep up.
Can you recommend a fabricator?
Yes. We work with fabricators across West Michigan and can connect you with a shop suited to your project.
Can you get structural designs stamped by a PE?
Yes. For lifting equipment, platforms and other structures that need certification, we work with a licensed professional engineering partner to review and stamp the design.
Can you model an existing weldment that has no drawings?
Yes. We can 3D scan it and rebuild it as a SolidWorks weldment, then make design changes from there.
What file formats do you deliver?
SolidWorks models, STEP files, DXF flat patterns and PDF drawings, plus anything else your shop needs.
Start Your Sheet Metal or Weldment Project
Send us a sketch, photos or an existing part, and tell us what it needs to do. Call 616-604-1977, email [email protected], or use our contact form.