The box and pan brake – if you want to bend a box
Posted by admin on 13 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: box and pan brake
There are basically two types of sheet metal brakes – the regular type, for doing parallel bends, and the finger brake, also known as the box and pan brake.
If you want to make sheet metal boxes or enclosures, a regular sheet metal brake isn’t going to cut it. To bend a piece of sheet metal into a box shape, you need to make perpendicular bends, but doing so on a normal brake would be impossible without eventually crushing the box. What you need is this – a box and pan brake:
Box and pan brake
As you can see, the box and pan brake has a partitioned clamping leaf. These partitions are called “fingers”. To bend a box shape, you simply choose a finger of the width of your desired bend. Then you remove the fingers next to it. You can now make the two first parallel bends. if you are making a square box (all sides of equal length), you can proceed to make the two bends perpendicular to the first bends. If your box is rectangular, you will need to bend the shortest sides first, and then change to a wider finger (or simply add a finger next to the first one) to make the longer bends. To understand this process, watch this demonstration of a box and pan brake:
You can clearly see the operator making the first two bends as if he was using a standard sheet metal bender, then choosing the finger that fits the width of the second set of parallel bends, moving or removing the adjacent fingers that would otherwise crush the box shape, and the making the second set of bends.
Box and pan brakes usually come with a selection of fingers that fit most purposes, especially since two or more fingers can always be combined for even more bending possibilities. On top of that, most manufacturers will make you custom fingers, if you need something beyond the standard selection.
Overall, the box and pan brake is indeed a very flexible type of machine. It could even be used to fill in for a normal sheet metal folder, if you dont have one of those in your shop. This will probably be tempting for many who don’t have the shop space for both, or who have limited funds for buying metal working machines.
For more general information about sheet metal brakes:
