Calculating the true arc length of a conical development

Using Circles in AutoCAD or Arcs measured from divisions on blueprints or drawings to layout a radial
line development pattern has always raised questions in my development classes, so I thought I would
address this question here…

The Problem

By using dividers in conventional drawing on a board, or by using circles to measure the length of
segments in a CAD program like AutoCAD always leads to someone asking how accurate it is, given the
fact that we are effectively using a chord of a curved surface, and “wouldn’t the curved line be longer?”.

Well yes, it would obviously, but not by much. A very small amount in fact, much less than you would
normally leave as a gap to obtain full penetration on a welded seam, if indeed it was to be welded up.
But let’s look at the problem and how this applies to one of the examples we have already done in
Radial Line Development, Exercise 1.

In Exercise 1 we have a straight topped conical section 2.5” in Diameter at it’s base, and 2.5” in vertical
height, see fig 1 below.

Figure 1: Cone from Exercise 1

So what is this anomaly that we have here, what causes these questions? Well if you are using CAD and
you zoom in to the development you will see it. The dashed line is the direct line or radius of the circle
that you are using, it is a chord between two points and it is measuring the divisions of the segments, on
a drawing board you will still be using the chord measurement, but you only need to arc the next point,
but the principle is still the same. We are using a linear measurement to measure on a curved line.

In the Screenshot from a CAD screen below (Figure 2), you will see the long-curved line which is the
outside of the pattern, and the dashed line is the chord measurement we get when measuring using the
radius of a circle (in CAD) or the arc of a compass/divider.

Figure 2: Curved edge vs chordal measure

So what next? Well first we find the apex, it is conical after all, and our “pie slice” of a pattern will be
developed from there. We can then draw our plan view directly below the cone and divide it up into 12
segments. If we draw a circle, using its radius to measure distance between those segments we can use
this to “step around” our pattern.

We draw two circles both from the apex, the first to the top right-hand side of the cone, the second to
the bottom right-hand side of the cone, we have the developed curve of our pattern. The only thing left
to do is draw a start line, then step around the outer curve using the smaller circle we made that
measures the length of each segment on the plan view. The Red line in the screenshot below is our
developed pattern.

Figure 3: Development
So what difference does that make? Well there is a way to calculate what the total arc length should be
by defining the total included angle of the pattern, but before we do that lets look at the pattern we just
developed. We will need these measurements to compare them with the calculated measurements.

After using the angular measurement tool in AutoCAD our developed angle is 132.382984 degrees with
a total Arc Length of 7.7766” measured around the outside of the pattern.

So now let’s look at the calculated angle…

Well, first we measure the cone or the CAD marking the following as shown in Figure 4

Figure 4: Measurements of the Cone

To find the Inclusive angle we use the following formula:

180 Degrees X D/R

D = Outer Diameter of our Cone

R = Larger Radius of our Pattern

Thus = 180 X 2.5/3.3657 = 133.701756 Degrees

If we draw another line over our start line, then rotate out 133.701756 degree using the Apex it gives us
a total arc length of 7.8540”.

7.8540” – 7.7766” = 0.0774” of difference between the developed length and the calculated “true”
length

That’s just over 1/16”

We leave that sort of gap to get full penetration anyway when we are welding, to me… that’s not that
much of a concern, it’s well within normal workshop tolerances.

So, what if we increase the number of segments, how would that affect the results? Well shortening the
segment length will reduce any error, so I drew up a 24-segment pattern…

This time its arc length was 7.8346

7.8540” – 7.8346” = 0.0194”

That’s just a little over 1/64”

Nearly a quarter of the original error.

Please also note that a slight alteration to the formula is needed when forming for a materials thickness

180 Degrees X (D-Thk)/R