Bending Stainless Steel Sheet

Bending is one of the most common sheet metal fabrication operations.

Bending stainless steel sheet.

This makes bending stainless steel with common hand tools difficult and a sheet metal brake is often required. Equally equipment capacity will be much lower than for carbon steels. Material bend radii and minimum bend size charts. A difference is that working hardening rates may mean a need for more rigid equipment and higher power levels.

Mild steel 2 12 ga. Make your own sheet metal break. The force must exceed the material s yield strength to achieve a plastic deformation. Like many other fabrication methods for stainless steel bending can be done using the same equipment used to bend other metals.

Stainless steel 1 20 ga. This is done through the application of force on a workpiece. Also known as press braking flanging die bending folding and edging this method is used to deform a material to an angular shape. In other words if you re bending 1 8 sheet use a tool with a 1 8 radius to form the inside of the bend.

Stainless steel 1 14 ga. The bend radius you select may not be available if the geometry of the part will not allow us to bend with the specific tooling required to achieve that radius. Mild steel 1 brake shear slip roll 1 metal forming 1. As you bend a stainless steel sheet the bend area cold hardens increasing the amount of pressure required to finish the bend.

This added hardness increases the amount of force needed to place a bend on a stainless steel sheet. Most frequently expensive sheet metal bending tools called brakes are used to bend sheet metal but you can also complete this task without one. It just won t really. 2 the stainless steel sheet has a strong rebound tendency compared with carbon steel when bending.

For most applications with stainless steel or aluminum you can get away with a zero radius bend on anything under 0 050 thick. Mild steel 1 16 ga. Bending of stainless steel.