When engineers need to make curved or bent pieces of sheet metal, they use company-written tables, rules of thumb, and guesstimates to determine the length of straight stock needed for bending into a ...

Fast forward more than two decades. The founder of Freedom Fabricators in Jupiter, Fla., stands in front of a large press brake and its touchscreen controller, again working aluminum—this time on a ...

The flat layout can be applied to scribe lines where the bending punch tip will make contact in the center of the bend. Aiming marks for the bending process can include a laser-scribed bend line or ...

This article was originally published Sept. 21, 2016. It was updated Feb. 2, 2023. Engineers designing sheet metal parts and products are often unaware of the difficulties or impossible tasks their ...

If you have ever looked closely at a typical mass-produced automobile, you will be familiar with pressed-steel panels. Complex curves can be repeated thousands of times over, by putting a sheet of ...