Sheet Metal Brakes.com

When shopping for a hydraulic press brake, there are a number of factors to be aware of.
Press brakes nowadays are mostly hydraulic machines – that is they perform the bending of the sheet metal using a hydraulic ram to exert the necessary force. Many are also highly adjustable, to allow for more precision in manufacture. These adjustments can be mechanically implemented, and sometimes with added computer control. A brake press is often a complicated and expensive piece of machinery, that require knowledge and experience from the operator, and careful maintenance of the above mentioned systems, to operate optimally. Safety is also much more of an issue with a press brake, than it is with a manual sheet metal brake.

Lots of things to think about, but don’t be overwhelmed – everything will come together, and your production capabilities will soar. Let’s try and brake the press brake down to its elements, to better understand what needs to be considered before purchase:

The hydraulics system is the heart of the press brake. The power available in the hydraulic ram is expressed in tonnage. When choosing a press brake, it is important to know how much tonnage you need, which depends on the work you do. The only way to know for sure what you need, is to consult an engineer who knows about sheet metal. Suffice it to say, that you should look at getting a bit of excess capacity. Routinely operating the ram close to its maximum potential, could bring you dangerously close to exceeding that maximum, resulting in what is called ram upset (breaking it, in plain english). Bring an example of a part you want to produce, or a production drawing, when you talk to the engineer.

Press brake tooling is another important thing to know about. Press brakes don’t have clamping and bending leafs. They have punches and dies. The punch can be thought of as the “male” tool pressing the sheet metal blank down into the “female” die, thereby creating a bend or deformation in the blank. A very common setup would a combination of an arrow-shaped punch and a v-shaped die, but many more shapes exist, making for endless variations of bending and shaping. The tooling is one of the reasons the press brake is such a flexible machine.

Controlling the press brake is done either manually by adjusting wheels and thumbscrews, or more or less automatically by an electrical system. Cnc press brakes are really gaining in popularity right now – they are coming down in price, and studies have shown them to be feasible to invest in, even for smaller businesses. Cnc control starts with a CAD drawing of the part to be made. With this drawing loaded in to the system, the press brake can now extract information about how to set the back gages for the first- and consecutive- bends. This means the operator can simply feed the blank into the machine, perform the bend, remove the part and wait for the backgage to automatically adjust for the next bend in the sequence. That means a tremendous amount of time saved in setup. The cnc system also knows how much pressure to apply, whether to bottom bend or air bend, and so on. A cnc press brake can be a real boon to your business, no doubt about it.

More about hydraulic press brakes:

No comments »