Building a Sheet Metal Brake 

Thanks! I actually took some inspiration from your build, and yet I still ended up underestimating how much these want to flex :)

Very true, but looks like you solved the issue pretty good. Mine does the same so maybe a mod like your will help. Cheers!

Ha, some day for sure! If I can ever afford it, and actually dare to weld it, Titanium is expensive as hell :) Awesome material though.

Probably ;) But like I said in the description, you can easily make this using just an angle grinder and a hand drill. I've even seen people make them without any welding. The mill just makes it a little more... elegant

Phil Vandelay It definitely does make all the lines nice & straight, as well as the cut depths even. I know I need to make one; just need to find the time.

Glad I could help ;)

Hey man, whatever happen to you :), No vids for 2 months

Good question! I thought about doing that too, basically closing off the inside of the angle using flat bar. But a lot of the time, a larger effective cross section (which the diagonals provide) will give you more stiffness than using thicker/more material. Like for example, a tube with a larger diameter will usually give you more stiffness than more wall thickness at the same diameter. But the main reason I went with this was that this was the material I happened to have laying around ;) And also because I noticed almost all the commercial brakes also have the diagonal braces. I think it comes down to the width, if you don't need a brake as wide as this I think you can get away with just using thicker walls or triangulating. This only became a problem when I tried to bend those wide sheets (120cm / 4feet). But if you have really long pieces, this solution adds a huge amount of rigidity relative to the amount of material you're using. So I guess I don't have a definitive answer.. Maybe start with your first option, because you can always add the supports later like I did. By the way check out Scott Turner on RU-vid, great channel and he recently made a Brake too and ran into the same problems. Always interesting to watch everyone come up with their own solutions!

I actually haven't seen that, I'm guessing it's supposed to increase the bend radius? Honestly though, I doubt you'd be able to bend anything thicker than 2mm steel with a brake in this style anyway, unless you make it way, way beefier. As for the knobs, yeah they work great! Way more comfortable to use than wing nuts or a wrench. If your clamp bar is straight, you don't even need that much pressure. My problem before was that it would clamp on the sides but leave a gap in the middle.

Mit einer Kantbank in dem Format kann man ohnehin nicht viel mehr als 2mm Bleche biegen, dafür müsste das Ganze noch wesentlich massiver sein. Und was anderes habe ich auch nicht vor, im Prinzip brauche ich das Teil nur für 1mm Alublech. In dem Bereich spielt das eigentlich nicht so eine große Rolle. Dafür dass die Konstruktion schwere Fehler hat funktioniert sie jedenfalls ganz gut ;)

Sf300 mower