This little 0.9mm thick 304 stainless steel lever is typical of the smaller “tricky” sheet metal components we are often asked to manufacture for our customers. We were lucky this time in having a 3D SAT file from our customer direct from their Cad software which we could then read in our Radan sheet metal 3D solid modeller. Having this data gave us the advantage of producing a quick developed flat blank for CNC programming and a good reference point for inspection. With a few modifications agreed with the customer to make the part suitable for manufacturing, we could CNC punch and CNC bend the sheet metal part on our Trumpf plant. In this case the order was only for 2 samples with a view to production later in the year. CNC punching and CN
C bending are ideally suited to this type of small batch production. If this part is run in a 100’s or a few 1000’s then these methods would still be the best way to go. When the quantities start to get into batches of several thousand at a time we suggest moving the part over to press tooling, which we can produce in our press shop.