Dec
6
Gimme a Brake! A sheet metal brake, that is…
By DW
Quick note: I’m going to redirect my posting notifications to my own twitter channel to free up the kwartzlab channel. Follow DarinTheGreat if you like.
Research In Motion kindly donated a sheet metal brake/shear/roller to kwartzlab on Friday. Thank you, RIM! Special thanks to James and Rob from the Hardware Engineering Lab. And thanks to our members:
- James – truck driver, ramp builder, RIM administration navigator
- Gus – transport organizer, truck driver
- Karl, Ben, Cedric – muscle
- I was the chauffeur and chief worrier.
So what can you do with this tool? Well if you ask Gus, you can build an airplane. More specifically, you use the brake to make nice straight bends in sheet metal, the shear to cut sheet metal, and the roller to, that’s right, roll sheet metal. This could be used to create project boxes, custom brackets, metal costume pieces, and a million other things. It’s a great contribution to the lab.
Click through for more…
Touch the brake, Karl! Yes, you love the brake. This will bend the aluminum robot chassis that Karl mills on his CNC machine.
The brake’s new home. Check out that very serious wheeled base, which is required because the brake weighs a ton. That’s why we needed to build ramps and rent a truck with a lift gate. For future reference, the lift gate on a Ryder 16′ truck is only about 1″ deeper than the brake cart. Just squeaked that one off the truck.
The rules.
If you had any doubt about the weight, check out the 1″ plate steel on the ends.
These fingers make the bends and can be reconfigured to do inside-box bends.
The shear.
The rollers are under that shield on the top.
Stay tuned to the Health & Safety Committee for guidance and required training on this tool.
Happy making,
DW
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This thing is even better than the one I used in college! Great addition
Well I guess this beast solves the problem on what to use to cut PCBs!
“Step 1: Read the owner’s manual carefully”
Do we even *have* an owner’s manual for this awesome hunk of thing? ^^
I’m just in here late Friday night, checking out the capacities of the brake. I want to use it to bend up a nice enclosure for a variac I picked up at the UW surplus sale years ago.
I actually used this machine a long time ago, at RIM. I seem to recall the bending fingers extended all the way across without gaps at the time. Seems like some of the fingers have gone missing.
As for that instruction sheet stuck on it, seems like maybe we should replace it with something more appropriate to the actual tool. This seems like a generic form, probably stuck on there by RIM’s lawyers. Things like “Make sure the motor switch is set to the OFF position” are pretty silly to post on a machine that has no motor.