Choosing Steel For Sheet Metal Bending

The force must exceed the material s yield strength to achieve a plastic deformation.

Choosing steel for sheet metal bending.

If you try to bend it when it s hardened it ll probably snap. A cutout or the edge of your flange to your bend. Choose a bend radius that matches your minimum bend. Very bendable when fully annealed.

Building with metal is great it s strong versatile and looks cool. When folding sheet metal if the resulting radius is less than the thickness we are bending then the extra material must go somewhere and can cause an undesirable deformation. When you re getting started on a metal project the first step is determining what type of material will work best. Also known as press braking flanging die bending folding and edging this method is used to deform a material to an angular shape.

Grade 410 offers less corrosion resistance but is heat treatable. Now moving into something that will be more specific to each customer and each sheet metal project. Commonly used bends include v bend z bend offset bend and hemming bend etc. It is very important that you are using the correct product to optimize efficiency and functionality.

Stainless steel there are a number of grades to choose from for the purpose of this white paper we will focus on the top three found in precision sheet metal fabrication. This is choosing the right thickness or gauge of sheet metal. When bending steel no material is lost and no material is gained. To use the tables below.

Choosing the right gauge sheet metal for your fabrication. The sheet metal bending height should be at least 2 times the thickness of the sheet metal plus the bending radius that is h 2t r. Red for left green for right and yellow for straight. This is very malleable and you should be able to bend it cold without problem.

Bending is one of the most common sheet metal fabrication operations. Austenitic stainless is a non magnetic any of the 300 series steel that contains high levels of chromium and nickel and low levels of carbon. Depending on the cut shape you ll use left cut right cut or straight snips typically indicated by the handle color. Bending is a stamping process that uses pressure to force the material to plastically deform.

Thereby forming a certain angle and curvature shape. This is done through the application of force on a workpiece. It is possible to choose other bends but tooling charges may apply. A radius that is larger than the thickness of the material has no aesthetical issues.

You ll need to heat treat it again to get it to perform like spring steel once it s formed in the shape you want. Determine your minimum bend by measuring the distance from your closest feature i e.