Sheet Metal Brake

[ruxu]

For a while I have been planning to make a sheet metal brake that could bend parts up to 125 cm wide that is the common width of sheet metal plates here in Finland. When my daughters family needed window and door sill plates for their garage and storage building I had a good reason to start the project.

Here are some pictures of the painted and assembled sheet metal brake. I made an angle scale in the left end of the brake. In order to be able to do repetitive angles I made an adjustable stop mechanism. In order to make it easier to insert the workpiece under the upper hold down angle I used two strong springs salvaged from a VW Golf driveshaft flange to rise the hold down angle about 5mm above the bed when you loosen the tightening nuts.



Here are some additional pictures from the building process. The hardest thing was to mill the bed and hold down angle surfaces with my Sieg SX3L mill that has a travel of about 560 mm and the workpieces were 1400 mm long so I had to mill them in three passes. The surface finish is not perfect but they are pretty straight. The last picture shows the window sills that I bended as testing before painting the brake. Before anyone asks about how I bended the end bends - I did them with loose Promecam tools in my bench vise.







I already had about half of the needed hardware so the total cost of the finished sheet metal brake ended at about 100 euros.