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Mild steel enclosures after CNC punching and CNC bending

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

Mild steel trays after CNC punching and CNC bending

Mild steel sheet metal electronics enclosures come in so many shapes and sizes. These enclosures are fairly simples being CNC punched from 0.9mm CR4 mild steel as a developed cross shape in one of our Trumpf CNC punch presses. They have been edge de-burred to remove any sharp edges and blunted on the corners where the components have tags from being held within the CNC punched sheet nest. The shape was created in our Edwards Pearson PR6 CNC press brake with 8 x 90 degree bends. You can see that the corners are not yet welded at this stage but they will be by TiG welding and then finally cleaned off smooth back to the original parent sheet metal. These particular enclosures were then powder coated matt black.

We manufacture enclosures from sheet metal which may be simple one part boxes to complex assemblies with many fabricated and welded components. If you have a project that needs sheet metal enclosures why not give us a go and see what we can do you for.

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3mm thick sheet metal material after CNC bending

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

3mm thick sheet metal material after CNC bending

Sheet metal angles manufactured in our sheet metal workshops here in Fareham, Hampshire.

These sheet metal angle brackets are typical of the work we manufacture using our Trumpf CNC punching and CNC bending machines. These brackets have been CNC punched from 3mm mild steel and clearly show the CNC tooling marks on the end of each component. These angle brackets were then de-burred using our vertical belt de-burring machines to remove the sharpness of the sheet metal edge and the CNC punch tool witnesses. These particular components were then powder coated so there was no evidence of the CNC punching process for the customer.

If you want to know more about the options you have when having sheet metal work cleaned up please contact us and we can explore your sheet metal projects and the best solution for you.

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Rolling sheet metal tubes in thin gauge material

Monday, January 30th, 2012

Rolling sheet metal tubes in thin gauge material

When round sheet metal components are needed in a sheet metal design there are several ways of achieving this shape. Firstly, if a standard round tube can be used in the design with a suitable diameter and wall size it’s easy to saw the tube to length and drill holes or weld it into a fabricated assembly. This cannot always be achieved with standard tube so then the tube would need to be created by rolling a sheet metal blank into a tube. This may be fully seam welded along the closing joint and then cleaned off smooth or sometimes just tack welded together at the sheet joint. This method does allow holes to be CNC punched first if a little distortion when being rolled up into a circular tube is not a problem in the final design. If a part circle is needed, say a semi-circle, the process of multi-bending on one of our CNC press brakes can be used. This consists of CNC punching the initial flat shape and then creating the curved form with a series of small bends at an angle to each other to create the flats at a tangent to the desired circumference. This manufacturing process can be very effective and with no special tooling cost effective for small batch work. The final method is to make up special form tooling to enable the sheet metal blanks to be pressed between top (punch) and bottom (die) tooling to create the curve in 1 or more hits.

With all sheet metal work designs it’s always worth a quick call to see which method would best suit depending on material, gauge, size and volume.

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Sheet metal copper angle brackets

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

Copper sheet metal brackets

Years ago copper was used on many industrial and domestic metal products due to its natural thermal and electrical properties. It could be copper pipes, electrical switch gear, buzz bars, roof tiles, saucepan bottoms the list goes on and on. Today due to its cost, currently at over £6,000 per tonne its uses can be limited to those that really need its electrical and thermal conductivity properties.

These small brackets and the larger sheet metal copper angle brackets are used in electrical component applications. They have simply been CNC punched, barrel (rumble) de-burred and CNC bent on our Trumpf 7036 CNC press brakes. These small, thin gauge sheet metal angle brackets are typical of the sheet metal work that these CNC machines are perfectly designed for.  With batch sizes of just dozens to many hundreds or thousands press tooling is not required.  If however, the volumes start to rise further we would investigate press tooling to help reduce the price as long as the design has been fixed and design changes are not needed.

Copper sheet metal angle brackets

If you have copper or brass sheet metal brackets, angles, plates or panels that need manufacturing please contact us and we will be happy to provide you with a price.

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LED display boards with sheet metal enclosures

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Sheet metal LED display board housing

When manufacturing bespoke LED display boards where the length, width, height and LED PCB layouts can change from project to project CNC punched sheet metal work is the way to go. With the ability to take previous CNC programs and adapt them to suit using parametric programming techniques new sheet metal fabrication projects can be created quickly with the knowledge that past cut sizes which have been proven to be correct can be retained as the basis for each new project. Our customer often has little time to get the initial order, write the software, design the LED PCBs and the mechanical parts for their LED display projects so knowing that the sheet metal work is sorted easily is a great help. Our relationship with the customer is such that the detailed drawings are given to us as DXF files with no dimensions and we are left to work from previous proven examples and take what data we need from the DXF. This saves our customer lots of time and enables us to solve our own problems using their DXF for sizes.

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