Time is money in manufacturing, and it’s all about time when you’re trying to get a new design to market or get a revision released to fix a critical problem. To meet the time crunch, designers use the latest generation of solid-modeling tools and push limits with their latest creations. As a result, fabricators must…
Bending is at the heart of metal fabrication. How well jobs flow through the press brake department often dictates how smoothly jobs flow through the entire shop, from raw stock to the shipping dock. Inefficiencies at the brake can ripple through the entire operation. What causes these inefficiencies? That’s difficult to answer without first actually…
Question:Â We have a very difficult part to gauge. The bends are at odd angles. That is, the bends are not square to the part, and yet the part itself still needs to be square while holding a linear tolerance that is very tight. How would you go about forming this part? Answer: Judging by the drawings,…
For many metal fabricators, watching the Super Bowl is about as exciting as it gets. They get caught up in the throes of the throws, the midair leaps, the grunts, the near-misses, and the just-caught. For the husband-and-wife owners of Weaver Precision Fabrication & Finishing, Super Bowl 2016 was especially exciting because a halftime commercial…
In particular, sheet metal was used extensively for roofing and building cladding. These applications were well-suited to the swing bending machine’s geometry, and the modern metal folding industry was born. A number of German manufacturers began adding powered backgauges with rudimentary numerical controls in the ’60s. By the ’80s, fully multiaxis computer numerical controllers (CNCs)…
In the early 1990s a sheet metal bending machine started having an increased presence in the U.S. market. The technology wasn’t common stateside, though it had by that time long established itself in Europe. It hit the roofing and architectural fabrication market first, then gradually made its way to the precision and industrial segments. It…
Tread plate and perforated sheet have bending characteristics that baffle and frustrate. They just won’t hold still. They shift slightly, go askew. They act as if they have a life of their own, and in a sense they do. They want to bend at their weakest point, the path of least resistance—and that may not…
It’s not surprising that Steve Horn, a New Yorker to the core, uses a pizza crust to describe one of the most unusual jobs to pass through his Brooklyn fab shop. The president of Sure Iron Works took on the job of fabricating two pedestrian bridges—not out of the ordinary, until you consider the specs:…
Top quality and delivery gets a fabricator in customers’ doors. If a company can’t produce good parts on time, it’ll have a tough time growing let alone sustaining itself. The market has become just too competitive for mediocre performance. So what causes quality and delivery problems? One answer is rework from bad parts, which is…
Welding is a valuable skill to help you be successful in the metal fabrication industry, but what other qualities or characteristics do you need to excel and stand out from the crowd? Hands down, no doubt about it, you need to learn to become a creative fabricator. Fabrication begins way before the metal even arrives,…