July 22, 2017. The sheet metal bender.

Yet another big break between update, starting old and working to the new…

Sheet metal bender

I needed a sheet metal bender to get the aluminium sheet parts ready for gluing- riveting to the frame. Not wanting to spend the money on a serious unit I visited the Darwin dump recycling store and came back with some likely looking scrap, this was a set of parallel bars from a gym or hospital and steel from some sort of structure:

Some thinking about it and drawing it up in Onshape.com I came up with:

Which with a lot of grinding welding and swearing turned into:

Which due to the broken phone camera is out of focus, this could bend thin stuff pretty well, like this:

But the clamp ends proved weak and needed reinforcing to do serious material, unsurprisingly the box collapsed under the load…

After more cutting, grinding and swearing using the remains of the scrap metal to hand the reinforced version was ready:

This was good enough to put a 45 degree (ish) bend in 250mm of 3mm thick stainless steel.

With a functioning bender I could now get on with the sheet metal work.