Sheet metal products can be supplied in a flat state or with a series of bends and forms to create simple through to very complex profiles. Most of the sheet metal work that we produce have bends that we produce with top and bottom V block tooling on our CNC press brakes. Sometimes however a bend may be very difficult to get to with standard tooling or a customer may want a design where they can assembly electronics into a housing and then fold a lid down theirselves rather than have a box and a seperate cover. This case is shown below with the flat pattern 2D image (on the left), CNC punch press tooled part (in the middle) and the final CNC nest of parts ready for production (on the right).
The part had several normal bends but the vertical slotted line was left flat by us and finished off by our customer when they had finished the product assembly. The punched slots are just enough to weaken the bend line so that it can easily be bent by hand but strong enough to hold together in it’s final use. If you have a sheet metal product design where you may need this type of feature please contact us and we will be happy to advise you or try out some sample pieces of sheet metal to enable you to establish the right design.