3D Printed Sheet Metal Forming (Part 2)

after a bunch of iterations I finally developed a process for making 3d printed tooling for forming sheet metal parts the tools themselves are pretty difficult to make geometries which is well suited to 3d printing and they only take a few hours to print the results are getting really quite good with the parts being what I would consider close to production quality this is a really great process if there are some parts you want to make that would be difficult to do with normal bending and you want to make maybe a few hundred or a thousand of them so between this and my previous video hopefully there's enough information that you can replicate the results on whatever part you want to make I'm really stoked by these forming tools they work well much better than I expected them to work and that's a little bit due to some upgrades so I have this fancy new tool with a rotary action on it but it's almost entirely due to basically me designing them right and it turns out and the previous design I did the opposite of that I designed them wrong I thought that I had designed them right that's usually the case and by designing it right I mean leaving space for the metal in the tool so the previous tools didn't actually have any clearance these basically snap together and there's there's no play at all so I decide front to back and you might be thinking allow is really stupid why would you do that I didn't mean to the 3d design software that I'm using has this feature called adaptivity and basically what it means is that when you change one part it'll change another part in order to make clearance I took this part and I thickened it by the thickness of the sheet metal and then I took this top form and derived it from that by subtracting it from from that thick in geometry but I wanted to use this to print so I unthinking it and thanks to the adaptive 'ti it and widened this to still fit which normally it's great when the cad system does that for you but not great in my case and i didn't actually realize that i had established that link in that way every tool I made had this problem the way I discovered this is I was thinking about how the tool cracking apart just didn't really add up because most of the forces should be nominally in compression the majority the forming is done by this upper tool which you push through the slot with a lot of force and in order to bend the material this way it's pushing that way on the part so it's it's squeezing this part down as tightly as it can and the upper part is mostly there to provide the force to bend it around this feature there's some amount of bending that happens around the outer form it should again be mostly in compression it's surprising to me that this would break the toilet part and so I looked in the CAD there was no clearance that I went and checked my tools and no clearance and that explains a lot so what would happen is we take the steel and we try to shove it into the hole as at with up to 20 tons of force something's gotta give and it wasn't the steel trying to form this part was kind of like trying to put your pants on after four Thanksgivings in a row with your parents your in-laws your friends and your co-workers you can try but something's probably going to split apart and it's probably gonna be your pants so basically just design it with clearance and everything is great my previous tool design couldn't form 90-degree corners because it was a straight pull tool it comes straight down on the part and it at best can push the material to 90 degrees and then the metal always has spring back so I pushed the 90 and it'll spring out to some other angle you can see in my previous video an explanation for this if you're interested and by giving this tool in action basically moving parts beyond a straight pool I'm able to bend the part beyond 90 degrees so if I push these down you can see that they're forming a bi 90 degree angle and so the the form that I'm using has I believe three degrees of clearance maybe four you shouldn't actually need that much for this thickness material but I went a little overboard to make sure that I absolutely formed at least a 90 degree angle and so these wrap around the part and from the material around it giving me a final 90 degree Bend so the other big upgrade is that it now can been 90-degree corners and I got rid of those stupid Springs on that tool which never seemed to work right and the springs would never stay glued so the reason I needed the springs before was to compress the top of the part so that it would be flat here's a this is a example of what it looks like if you don't have the Springs the top is extremely not flat and that's because we're bending right next to this hole and there's not enough material here to bear the stress and it just bends up I have some improvement with one spring arrangement and then this is what it was looking like with the springs which is a lot better but it's still not totally flat with the new action die the top is totally flat this looks like a production part aside from my sort of plasma cutting edges this is really really good so the way that it achieves this he uses the part as the spring which is really cool and really elegant so we're going to bend the part we push on this top form which pushes through the part and then into the dies it pushes on the inner corner of the die which rotates up and folds up the edge on both sides symmetrically in order to bend the flange up we have to push through the part there's no way to bend it without pressing down on top of the part so you automatically are getting that pressure another neat thing you can do say I wasn't getting it flat enough and I wanted to get more compression I can vary the friction because I get both the force required to bend the flanges up plus the friction on on these sliding joints so that's another knob you can turn to to get more pressure if you need it I actually had the opposite problem when I had too much friction so this rigid material is not the lowest friction especially when you press on it it was getting to the point where I was actually I guess calling the material where it was pulling out little chunks of material from the compression and I fixed it by putting a layer aluminum tape which has really excellent frictional properties on plastic after I put that on there's no problems it just turned without any issue all right let's see if we can convert that success into some into another success this is a more complicated tool it's inspired by the drip tray on a Breville espresso machine I think it's the cool part and I want to see if I can produce something like that because it's a good real-world part and so I have this tool which basically a bunch of the previous tool arrayed out and I checked ten times there's definitely clearance so let's see if we can form grading using this the forming looks really quite good there's one obvious imperfection here along this back edge I think I basically just didn't have enough material there's definitely some scratching on the surface and it looks like there was some a bit of slag from the plasma cutter that was formed a really sharp bird edge which did a lot of that I should have deburred the bottom based on how this looks I have a feeling I'm not gonna be able to get this off of here but let's give it a try that was a huge pain in the butt the part looks pretty darn good I have to say I scratched it all up and bent it trying to get it off the forum if I could get this to come off the forum it would be very nice I'm gonna see if I can flatten it out I'm gonna put it back in here and give it a smash with the press I'm also going to take this messed up form that I just cracked try to get the part off I'm gonna machine this down so I only have the radii left and press with that and see how that does a machine down on the top of the upper die so that there's really only in the filip part left and we can hopefully hopefully use this to smash this no longer flat messed up for my removal part mostly flat remember there's that spring back so I'm not gonna be able to get a totally flat no matter how hard I press but hope that good call it good enough for for this test this part cleaned up surprisingly well it's now very flat and I just gave it a little bit of a rub with some scotch brite to remove some the the minor scratching I think this I think this part really wants to be done into two passes one with a much smaller sharper draft angle part to initially form the holes and then coming back with basically the tool that I used at the end of flatten it out I made a new tool this is the first half of the pressing operation so it only begins to form the features but it doesn't attempt to form the Philip and then I can use the other tool that I machined on previously to try to form the Philip so press with this press with this and hopefully it'll work this weird blue resin is it's called draft and it's super fast this form took I think about an hour maybe 55 minutes it's called draft because it prints really quickly and the trade-off is it doesn't have as much detail as other materials but we're forming steel here and the steel forms the average of whatever surface is here so I don't think the service official matter so long as the material can take it and as with any success I went ahead and printed three forms presumptuously assuming that this will work but I might actually hold off and reserve a couple of these because I have another part printing which is a much more aggressive all-in-one tool which has the fill it in this and I think the parts will come off it so we'll give this a shot and then we'll make a call and if we want to want to hit three of them or if we want to wait and try to the tool these turned out great I made two of them because the first one wasn't quite aligned inside the machine these tools don't really have great alignment features on them so the second one I was a bit more careful to align and it's really really good it's super flat I didn't really have any trouble getting out of the tool there's a little bit of a pinch but I was able to pop it out with a little plastic scraper everything's very symmetric there's no cracking in the steel this is almost a production part the only thing like the previous ones that makes it not production is honestly just the fact that you can see some plasma cut edges if I clean those up I think this part would be something you could put into a product I'm going to make a tool that does them all in one and see if I can do it in two steps instead of one step because why doing two steps today what you can do in one step tomorrow well it's still today so I guess I'm gonna do today in one step what I did today in two steps this is the hopefully final form for this press it's just printed in a regular gray material and it turned out really nicely you can see the geometry has an aggressive taper which should spread the material apart and then the fill it which should form that nice rounded shape at the end so we're gonna load this up and see if we can form a nice part and then crucially get it off without destroying it so let's give it a shot so it looks like it mostly worked it has the messed up edge like one of the earlier presses and I don't know if that is because the press was angled I had to reseed it and I also undersized these hole forming tools so those aren't fully formed but other than that it pressed pretty well it took a little a little bit of prying to get off the tool but it wasn't stuck on there like it was before I would want to maybe optimize this a bit more if I was gonna try to make a ton of them but overall I think you can do this in one step although qualitatively they do seem to come out better when you do it in two steps of course I only have one sample here so this could just be a bad part but it's a good place to end it it's been really satisfying to see this process go from making parts that are kind of like yeah I guess it sort of worked to parts that make you say wow that's a really nice part I am looking forward to using this in some future projects you might be wondering why you would print your tools instead of machining them which should give you a better result the basic answer is more people have access to 3d printers and they'd have machining centers and so if they want a tool they now have the means to make it which is awesome the other advantage is that 3d printing can make a tool that's very complex very quickly and very cheaply which is definitely not the case for normal machining if you need to only make a few hundred or thousand of something this might be the right process for your application as always I build stuff all the time so if you like what you see you should follow me and hopefully there's more goodness coming down the pipe that's all I got thanks

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 3,151,107

Rating: 4.9461474 out of 5

Keywords: 3d printing, plasma cutter, press, hydraulic press, formlabs, stereolithography, SLA, sheet metal, sheet metal forming, rapid prototyping, 3d printed, mechanical engineering, how to, 3d printed tools, metal forming, press brake dies, sheet metal forming machine, sheet metal forming techniques, sheet metal forming press, sheet metal forming press die, sheet metal forming die, rapid prototyping 3d printer, press brake tooling, metal bender, bending sheet metal

Id: 8cNeAOpR-Ws

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ballistic_Turtle]

Some cheap sheet metal, nippers, pipe, and a few coat hangers, and you could have some Rust-level tomfoolery.

Anyone know if models exist for 3D printing the tooling needed? Or maybe models for the current actual tooling, and confidence in their CAD/engineering skills?

Edit: Another example

Edit 2: Turns out the diagrams for every stamped weapon ever are so easy to find that they're even on Pinterest. Just need to improve at CAD now and I'll be pumping out useless hunks of poorly-bent buyback metal in no time. Still wanna know if anyone else has already done this though.

[u/MyDogKona]

There is a project on Thingiverse for this exact concept. It seems to still be a work in progress but it looks like it should work. There is also a jig on Thingiverse for bending CETME and G3 flats. From the pictures it looks like it works great. AK receivers are much simpler in comparison so I see no reason why it couldn't be done

[u/Jacksimus]

I've seen it done with a g3 flat. Don't see why and ak would be any harder.

[u/Viktor_Korobov]

Would it be possible to do something like this to bend glock rails and locking blocks?