Bending aluminium boxes
Here at V and F Sheet Metal we are folding up a wide range of sheet metal components on a daily basis. They can be small electronics screening cans in 0.3mm tin plated mild steel, 0.4mm special pre-anodised reflector aluminium alloys, 0.9mm zintec coated mild steel channels, 1.5mm pre-galvanised mild steel lighting gear trays, 2mm brushed stainless steel housings, 3mm copper bus bars, 4mm mild steel support angles, 19” rack aluminium components and so much more. The sheet metal work that we fold up may have just a single simple angle bend right through to multiple bent complex parts with easy bends, safe edges and multi bent curved sections. When folding sheet metal boxes we can employ a number of different machines and tooling techniques to make the right part for you.
Today we are going to look at a component that has electrical cut-outs cut in a 3mm thick aluminium part which will cause a problem is they are folded up with normal air bending V tooling. The problem with using standard V bend tooling with cut-outs that are too near the bend line is the unsupported material that will be in the die bend zone will not fully bend up. This problem is increased with the increase in the sheet metal component thickness. Once way around this would be to bend up the components first and then machine in the cut-outs after which is acceptable but slow and would lead to an expensive part. The tooling technique we use to solve this problem is to use a range of RollBend tooling from Trumpf. This tooling can be used in both our Trumpf 7036 and Safan e-Brake CNC press brakes enabling us to cover a wide range of tricky bending work.
The RollBend tooling rotates around 2 fixed points enabling the bottom tool to fully support the material as its being folded with no air gap. The machine can be set up with the standard top V tooling and can be run at the same speed as normal so importantly the part price is not affected by using this type of tooling. The set time is just as quick as using the normal bottom bend tooling and just drops straight into place in the bed of the machine.
Folded aluminium boxes
Here is the 3mm thick aluminium gear box folded up and ready to have a number of bushes and studs inserted before powder coating. You can see that the 2 circles and the 2 rectangular cut-outs have all the material between the cut-outs and the bend line bent up properly and require no other operations to straighten out the material. For more general information on CNC bending and CNC press brakes please follow the link.