February 20, 2024
Intro
A machine shop is often the unsung hero of different manufacturing projects within industries like aerospace, automotive, and consumer products. Many of these companies are using customized sheet metal bending services to achieve better performance, quicker turnaround times, and lower operating costs within their businesses. But, how can a machine shop make your production business run better?
That’s what we’ll explore in this quick guide. Our machining experts at Rapid Axis will explain how your large production run can be more cost-effective, optimized, and stress-free with our sheet metal bending services.
What Are Sheet Metal Bending Services?
Sheet metal bending services are offered by professional machine shops, and they involve working with thin metal — called sheet metal — to create jigs, fixtures, one-off parts, or assemblies. At Rapid Axis, we work with a number of different material types like aluminum, bronze, copper, stainless steel, and carbon steel.
Sheet metal bending specifically deals with bending these materials into certain shapes using a large machine called a “press brake”.
How Sheet Metal Bending Services Fit in Your Operation
Bending metal can actually help your production run, even if the produced unit has nothing to do with sheet metal, or metal in general. In other words, you can use a bent piece of aluminum to line up all of your plastic parts before they get assembled, inspected, or even manufactured.
How is this even possible? Imagine you have three parts that need to be a certain distance away, held in a certain orientation, and held still while another part is connected to them all. You can easily design a bent sheet metal fixture to act as the table for all of these parts, automatically positioning them in the right spot before they’re combined.
Sheet metal is a great way to help most operations, from assembly, injection molding, urethane casting, manufacturing, and stamping.
Benefits of Sheet Metal Bending in Large Production Runs
So many companies use bent sheet metal for their large-scale production runs, but why? At Rapid Axis, we’ve worked on a lot of bent sheet metal projects and we can answer that question. There are plenty of benefits of using bent sheet metal in large production runs:
Faster Setup Time
Arguably the biggest benefit of bent sheet metal in your production operation is that it can save you a ton of time. Instead of manually placing parts, measuring them, and holding them in place, it can all be done automatically with a custom-made metal jig. A jig is there to help you repeatably do the same task and achieve tighter tolerances in shorter amounts of time.
By using bent sheet metal parts, your setup time can be a fraction of the time it takes you to do the same operation manually.
Avoid Common Mistakes
Whenever humans are used in an operation, there’s room for human error. This is especially true when tight positioning has to happen before assembly. The beauty of a sheet metal jig or fixture is that it takes away a lot of human error and removes room for common mistakes.
For instance, consider the assembly on an airplane’s wing. A bent sheet metal jig might help you position the skin, ribs, spars, and stringers perfectly in relation to each other, holding each component in place while you fasten pieces together.
This helps your workers complete the task without being slightly off.
Take the Guesswork Out of Production
An example in Kaizen engineering is the idea of “poka-yoke” designs. It basically means designing a process or assembly that can physically only be done one way. By doing this, you take all the guesswork out of assembly work — this saves you time, saves money on fixing errors, and makes your operation a lot more accessible for operators.
Bent sheet metal fixtures and jigs are a perfect example of poka-yoke. With the right design, your parts will only fit a specific way for assembly.
It Can Save You a Lot of Money
In the manufacturing industry, two major factors play into how expensive your operation is: how long it takes to make your parts, and how many mistakes are made along the way. With longer turnaround times and more mistakes, your business will be significantly more expensive to keep running.
However, bent sheet metal jigs and fixtures will reliably shorten your turnaround times and eliminate common mistakes. That means that using sheet metal bending services can save you countless money over time.
Achieve Larger Production Rates
If you combine all of these benefits together, you’re left with much larger production rates and lower overall costs. This is the beauty of custom sheet metal jigs and fixtures — since they can be customized to fit your specific needs, your results can be personalized and tailored to ensure you get the most out of every production run.