Sheet Metal Bending Process
Sinoway offers CNC sheet metal bending processing services and different types of custom sheet metal bending parts.
We are proud of our ability to serve sheet metal bending processes and products to meet clients’ requirements, using the CNC press brakes and a series of tools. From the 1990s, Sinoway has started the conventional metal bending process service and kept it for more than 20 years. And our custom metal bending and forming parts serve a wide range of industries and get excellent reviews from our customers.
Our technical team includes rich-experienced engineers, who have been working with us from the factory established, and contains young guys with advanced technologies too. And the whole technical team has been equipped with modern mechanical fabrication designing software, Auto CAD, SolidWorks, Pro-E, UG, etc., to fulfill the currently more complicated products’ diverse requirements.
Simple introduction of the metal stamping process
1. What is a sheet metal bending process?
Bending is a kind of re-shaping process using a press brake on the sheet metals, and it is one of the most commonly used sheet metal fabrication operations. With this process, the equipment will force the workpiece to be deformed with a certain angle.
During the bending process, on the press brake, the workpiece to be formed is placed flat on the bottom mold with a V groove, then the other die block will press the workpiece material into the mold to form the shape out a certain angle. And due to the materials’ spring-back property, the metal sheet must be over-bent to achieve the proper bend angle.
And we usually use the bending process to form shapes like boxes, enclosures, U shapes, V shapes, etc.
A video showing the metal bending process
(Video from Energymission.com)
2. Suitable metal materials for the bending process
Generally speaking, the thickness is a significant point to consider the part’s bending property. The thinner the metal is, the more comfortable to be bent it will be. If the metal is too thick, or its ductility is weak, sometimes we need to do the heat treatment like annealing on the materials in advance or heat the part’s blanks before bending.
Usually, the most common metal we used for the bending process include:
- Mild steel sheets(sometimes after being heat-treated)
- Alloyed steel sheets like 65Mn
- Stainless steel sheets
- Aluminum sheets
- Mild Brass sheets
3. Different metal bending processes
3.1 Coining – Workpieces will contact the dies entirely during the bending process. Coining goes with high precision but also high cost, so that is not often used.
Figure 3.1 – Coining Bending
3.2 Bottom Bending – Small space is left between the workpiece and the bottom of the V opening on the die while bending. This process goes with better accuracy and less spring-back comparing to Air bending process but needs more dies and tools for each angle or sheet thickness or materials.
Figure 3.2 – Bottoming Bending
3.3 Air Bending – This is almost the most common used bending process. During air bending, the upper die will punch the material into the V groove of the bottom die, and the space left between the material and the bottom of the V groove is greater than the other bending processes. The air bending process is suitable for different kinds of metal sheets with different thicknesses but no need to change the dies, which means higher productivity.
Figure 3.3 – Air Bending
3.4 Roll Bending – This is a common process used to make metal sheets into curved shapes.
Figure 3.4 – Roll Bending
3.5 Rotary Bending – In the rotary bending process, the top die is made by a rotating steel cylinder with an open on it, and this open is cut out at the same angle as the shape of the workpiece. While the bending process is ongoing, the top die will rotate and bend the metal sheet material.
Figure 3.5 – Rotary Bending
3.6 Wipe Bending – With the wipe bending process, one end of the workpiece will be tightly clamped by pressure, and the punch on the upper die moves up and down, and that will bend the other end of the workpiece to a certain angle that we want.
Figure 3.6 – Wipe Bending
Unique advantages of Sinoway in sheet metal bending production
After more than 20 years of practice, Sinoway has demonstrated its strengths in the metal stamping and bending industry, excelling in the fierce industry competition. In addition to the necessary production conditions, several advantages that are unique to Sinoway include:
- The combination of traditional production processes and modern high technology allows the manufacture of components with higher complexity;
- A technical team that includes both hands-on production engineers from the workshop and professional design engineers from modern universities;
- In addition to metal stamping and bending lines, Sinoway also has other metal parts manufacturing lines such as casting, forging, machining, and surface treatment to meet customers’ demands for one-stop service of complete products;
- Sinoway has many metal material suppliers with whom we have cooperated for many years. They can supply quality metal sheets with different materials and thicknesses and under different national standards to ensure our quality consistency and production capacity;
Benefits of metal bending processes
As an effective processing method in the modern industry, the metal stamping and bending process have unique advantages for producing various sheet metal parts. It is an advanced manufacturing technology that is irreplaceable. The stamping and bending formed components’ benefits include light-weight, high stiffness, high strength, good interchangeability, low cost, easy to realize mechanical automation, and high production efficiency.
Compared with other processes, the metal stamping and bending process have a series of advantages: high production efficiency, low processing cost, high material utilization, stable dimensional accuracy, simple operation, easy mechanization, automation, etc. It is especially suitable for mass production.
Applications of sheet metal bending products
Only very few products require completely flat sheet metals, so sheet metal bending is applied in almost all the industrial fields. Commercial applications of parts made by the metal bending process often involve both simple and complex geometries with certain angles. And the most common usages of metal bending processes include:
Automotive body and structural parts
Aircraft components
Utensils
White goods
Construction metal parts
Furniture components
Types of Brackets
Quality control policy
Sinoway has established our quality management policy in strict accordance with the ISO 9001 standard. We require every step of the order execution process to be managed and controlled according to this policy to provide our customers with consistent quality products and services.
Our quality management policy includes the following aspects.
Inspection of raw material procurement and the quality;
Sample quality inspection of stamping dies;
Pre-production sample quality inspection;
Sampling inspection during the production process;
Quality inspection after mass production;
Packaging and transportation inspection;
All tests must have traceable inspection reports on file.
Win-Win Cooperation
With our specialty in sheet metal stamping production, we have been serving many customers engaged in different industries like Home Appliances, Construction, Automobiles, Heavy Equipment, etc.
