3D Printed Sheet Metal Forming - Will it Survive?

all right guys for those of you who follow me on instagram know that a few weeks back i picked up my first 3d printer and since then i've been experimenting with different ways to use the machine i recently saw a video from mike o'brien who's the lead engineer at roadster shop and i wanted to recreate one of his experiments using a 3d printer to build press dies for forming sheet metal using fusion 360 i modeled both halves of the dies the whole panel has a curved top surface there's an oval step feature that's also curved as well as two circular dimple dies an experienced metal worker could make something like this and probably in a lot less time than it took me to design print cure and then press these but if you don't have a bead roller or dimple die tools or if you need something that's like in an oddball size maybe this process will work and honestly i just wanted to try it i should mention that i didn't make exact mirrors of the top and bottom dies i'm thinking that having an exact fit between the dies will only add more pressure to the plastic without any significant benefit to helping shape the metal with the two dies overlaid you can see there's a slight air gap in all the areas i thought could get bound up by having a piece of sheet metal sandwiched between them this air gap may make the features less pronounced but we'll just have to see with the 3d printing software open i'm going to be printing both pieces at the same time there are all sorts of different parameters and settings that can be fine-tuned but i've only really made a couple of adjustments to the print settings to see what happens one of the main things that i've been adjusting is the infill which is the percentage of the inside of the part that's filled with the filament at a hundred percent infill that means it's a solid plastic part and any percentage less than that means it's that percentage plastic and then the rest is air at a hundred percent infill these dies would take over three and a half days to print so instead i've selected a gradual infill which means the amount of filament increases as it gets closer to the top of the surface i've stepped this graduation in three steps in three millimeter increments so that the top surface is solid then the next three millimeters has a 90 infill then three millimeters of 45 percent infill then the rest is 22.5 infill other settings that i've changed are the infill line width from 0.45 millimeters to 0.9 millimeters which reduces the number of triangles and doubled their thickness i've also increased the wall thickness to three millimeters and set the bottom thickness to zero so the bottom of each part is open for the fiberglass resin looking at the bottom you can see the stepped in fill in all sorts of surface area that the resin is hopefully going to bond to other than that all the settings were left to default i set up my camera and let the machine go to work [Music] all right so everything's printed out i'm actually really happy with how everything turned out the texture looks really good it doesn't look too jagged but it did print pretty well the corners lifted just a little bit on each of the corners but nothing too too crazy i think it'll still be okay and then i went through and i designed and printed really quickly this is just going to be to center punch and then mark the outside holes here for the different pieces of metal that i'm going to be trying to form with this piece so i think this will make this a little bit easier um so the next step i don't think that this is going to be able to work by itself so kind of what i'm counting on is for this polyester molding resin to actually fill in those voids and kind of act as though this was 100 filled in so let's give it a shot let's see where we go [Music] i'm using a scale to measure the ratio between the fiberglass resin and the hardener and i'm using styrofoam cups because i'm an idiot before starting this i did call the folks at fibre glast and they made it very clear this was not the correct application so i'm really not sure what's going to happen here i knew the chemical reaction between the resin and the hardener would generate a lot of heat which can easily warp the pla to help reduce the heat generated i poured this in two layers waiting about an hour between them i also put a weight on top of the dies to help keep them flat it was really difficult pouring even amounts into each of the pockets and in hindsight i probably should have just used a lot less hardener and let the dyes take a lot longer to cure but we'll see what happens [Music] at this point i've got 24 hours in 3d printing i'm gonna have to wait at least another 24 hours for the epoxy resin to be fully cured i should wait longer but i'm getting pretty excited to see what happens when i try shaping some sheet metal with these dyes since the second layer fills all the way to the top i decided not to put the weights on the dies because i didn't want to get them stuck this was probably a mistake as you'll see in a minute [Music] all right so the epoxy's had about 24 hours to cure now um i did have a bit of a problem here um a couple different things here uh the epoxy did pour over when i had it upside down i didn't notice that it leaked over so i had to sand this bit off to smooth this out and then the big issue that we've got which i tried to prevent by doing multiple layers but it looks like i still mixed it too hot is when the epoxy got really hot had the reaction it actually deformed the plastic so i noticed this about four hours into it curing and so to try to prevent it i kind of put it back together in the press because at that point the resin was hard enough and i just kind of flattened it out to see if it would help and then i've it still is warped but i've kind of gone ahead and sanded the edges here so it does still connect so with both the parts being warped you do see it lifting in the corners here when it's fully compressed so we're just going to lose a little bit of detail in the feature but i think we'll still go through um there's a good chance that we're going to fail this thing because now we're going to be pressing kind of at an angle so there's going to be a twist and not just a push but we'll uh we'll see where it goes as far as materials go here that we're going to try out i've got 16 gauge 6061 aluminum uh 6061 doesn't really like being bent that much so we'll see how that goes then we've got 22 gauge steel 18 gauge steel and then i just kind of had 16 gauge steel and 18 gauge stainless but there's not holes in these for a reason i have a feeling uh this thing's not gonna last so the feature is not perfect but i think a lot of that's due to the warping um let's try it again so honestly i'm really impressed with this the only place you start to see it kind of go away is on the very ends here and this might be because i don't have enough material here or it's also probably because the corners have lifted so this section of the feature is just really unclear but overall i i'm really impressed it curved everything just the way i wanted the inside profiles also curved i'm really impressed all right let's try uh let's move on to the 22 gauge steel this is a 22 gauge steel you can kind of see the same thing going on here where where it's pinching at the top here i don't think there's quite enough material um on this length of it or it's still something with the die but the rest of the profile honestly looks really good um so i think for for the next one um i'm gonna go ahead i'm gonna cut a longer piece out and see if that makes it any better the profile of the actual piece looks really good it's just all the area immediately outside of the dies you can see starts to have some deformation and starts to warp as i've been doing each one of these i feel like i'm standing further away from the press it's probably for the best wow this one's actually pretty good this is the 18 gauge again and everything actually looks really nice i'm actually really impressed with that i guess we're cutting holes in 16. all right we've got 16 gauge steel here um let's see how it goes i'm starting to lose my optimism here um but honestly i don't know the the 18 looked better than anything else that we've done so maybe the 16 will look even better if it doesn't uh explode on us let's see what happens you so as i've been doing each of these presses it's definitely getting a little bit more tense and doing the 16 gauge i honestly never thought that it would have done this i'm blown away at the results that it's gotten from this i'm gonna try pressing it again to see if we can get a little bit better definition out of it because i might i might have gotten a little bit nervous here i wish i had a way to measure the pressure that this whole thing was under but watch this whole frame of the press as i unload it all right so we've pressed it twice now and this shape's getting a little bit better it's still doing a little bit of funny business on the bottom here you can see that that curve is not perfect but the dies aren't touching still um the the corners are just warped a little bit too much but i mean otherwise and i'm pretty optimistic about that that uh that's pretty good all right this last one is 18 gauge stainless steel let's see how it goes [Music] that's pretty impressive [Music] i went ahead and flipped them all over so you can see the back sides here um yeah i'm pretty impressed honestly the 18 gauge one looks awesome it's a 16 gauge and then the stainless one the dies are in pretty good shape um there are a handful of cracks you could start to see in the resin we'll see if they'll pick up on the camera but there are quite a few uh stress cracks you can kind of hear it creaking as i was using it through the different uh through the different presses yeah this big crack that's all the way across here this actually was when i had found that the whole thing was warping and i initially put it in the press to try to flatten it out on its own so this one i saw before i started today but there are a bunch of other ones that you could start to see forming throughout the resin maybe giving it more cure time would help but really i mean this is under a lot of pressure here to be able to do like 16 gauge mild steel 18 gauge stainless steel that's pretty impressive especially for something that's kind of this size with really that much movement of the materials um i'm really happy so after doing all of these different presses the dies are actually in pretty good shape you know they have the cracks on the resin and stuff like that but i mean everything's still held up really well there's no deformations that i can see in the profile here you know this was from when i was sanding it before to get it to fit but i mean otherwise it kept its shape really well and i'm actually really impressed with that um and then all the different materials i mean so this is the aluminum piece it turned out really nice for being a piece of 16 gauge then the 22 gauge this one was a little bit funky uh you started to see a little bit of deformation on the top the big one this is definitely the worst one out of all of them you've got waviness kind of all around wherever the dye ran out of real estate it kind of started to warp like crazy but i think that's kind of expected in hindsight the 18 gauge this one actually turned out really good like i would call that really really good um the holes you know i did these with a hole saw so they're a little bit rough um but i mean you can see the dimples you can see the full oval i'm actually really impressed uh 16 gauge i'm still really impressed with this one you can definitely make out all the different features and it looks pretty good and then the stainless steel one i'm actually really impressed with i'm really happy with that that's definitely a usable part there if you were trying to make something like that this is definitely not something intended for like high run production or like a manufacturing aspect i'm sure there's a lot better solutions for something like that but honestly i'm pretty impressed uh if you're just doing like a short run of something or you need something one off really quick or i guess not really quick because this did take you know a day to print and a day for the epoxy to cure all right definitely let me know in the comments what you think keep in mind you know this is like the sixth or seventh thing that i've 3d printed so this is definitely unknown territory for me and i'm learning a lot as i'm doing this but i wanted to share it with you guys because i think it's really cool and i didn't really see much out there doing this um on youtube um so let me know what you think let me know what you think would improve this um and uh i'll see you guys in the next episode [Music] [Music] you

Channel: GrindhousePE

Views: 232,850

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printed, 3d print, 3d printed dimple dies, custom dimple dies, 3d printed tools, sheet metal forming, sheet metal shaping, metal forming, metal shaping, press dies

Id: fxzqkhmcRlY

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021