Sheet metal bending: technologies, methods, techniques and their features

Bending metal products is a fairly common task, regularly encountered by almost everyone who works with metals and rolled metal products. However, not all bending tasks can be accomplished with improvised tools or simple equipment. Therefore, there is a wide range of specialized machines and equipment designed for specific purposes. Given this fact, the most successful solution is often to entrust the task to a specialized company, such as https://www.metallistspb.ru/gibka-listovogo-metalla, where there is a complete list of the necessary equipment and technology that allows for precise bending of workpieces as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Types of bending equipment

Although the purpose of all bending equipment is to precisely bend a metal workpiece, there are several main types of bending equipment:

• Bending rolls are machines designed for working with sheet metal;
• Presses (including CNC machines) are the most common equipment in production, as they allow you to solve most problems, while performing the work accurately and quickly;
• Roller bending machines are most often used for bending profile metal products;
• Pipe benders allow you to bend pipes of almost any complexity, but with a bending radius of at least 4 times the diameter of the pipe being bent;
• Wire benders, as their name suggests, work with wire and can perform a wide variety of tasks. Machines are available with both CNC and manual control.

As this simplified list of equipment shows, to produce high-quality metal bending workpieces quickly, especially in large quantities, it's crucial to properly utilize the required number of specialized machines. Therefore, it's usually more cost-effective to order bending services from a company that already has all the necessary production facilities and has experienced personnel working on them for years. Even if a large run of parts is required, purchasing the machines, finding experienced workers, paying them, and all the associated costs may not necessarily be more cost-effective than using services from companies that have long had everything in place.

Even having metal bending equipment doesn't always guarantee high-quality work. There are certain tolerances and standards for bending radii. Violating these standards can compromise the integrity or strength of the part. The result is wasted time and money.