SHEET- METAL OPERATIONS

Many engineering components are produced from a flat

sheet of metal which is cut to shape and then folded to form
the finished article. The edges are then secured by a variety
of methods such as welding, brazing, soldering, and riveting.
The accuracy of size and shape of the finished article
depends upon the accuracy of drawing the shape on the flat
sheet, known as the development. Allowance is made at this
stage for folding or bending, the amount varying with the
radius of the bend and the metal thickness.
‫‪The thickness of metal sheet is identified by a series of numbers‬‬
‫‪known as standard wire gauge, or s.w.g. Table 4.1 lists the most‬‬
‫‪frequently used gauges and gives their thickness in millimeters.‬‬
‫‪Table 4.1 Most frequently used standard wire gauges‬‬
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
‫‪Thickness‬‬
‫‪S.W.G.‬‬ ‫)‪(mm‬‬
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
‫‪10‬‬ ‫‪3.2‬‬
‫‪12‬‬ ‫‪2.6‬‬
‫‪14‬‬ ‫‪2.0‬‬
‫‪16‬‬ ‫‪1.6‬‬
‫‪18‬‬ ‫‪1.2‬‬
‫‪19‬‬ ‫‪1.0‬‬
‫‪20‬‬ ‫‪0.9‬‬
‫‪22‬‬ ‫‪0.7‬‬
‫‪24‬‬ ‫‪0.6‬‬
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Cutting is carried out using simple snips for thin-gauge
steel up to around 20 s.w.g., treadle-operated guillotines
capable of cutting 14 s.w.g. steel, and hand-lever shears
for sheet up to 0.5 mm thick.
Holes and apertures can be cut using a simple hand-
operated punch or a punch and die fitted in a fly press.
For simple bends in thin material, bending can be carried
out in a vice. For bends in thicker material with a specific
bend radius, folding machines give greater accuracy with
less effort.
 Cutting and bending sheet metal

Straight- and curved-blade snips

Treadle guillotine Folding machine

Hand-lever shears
Development

Development of cylinder Development of cone Development of part cone

Development

In practice, the circumference must take account of the material

thickness. Any metal which is bent will stretch on the outside of the
bend and be compressed on the inside. Unless the metal is of very
light gauge, an allowance must be made for this. The allowance is
calculated on the assumption that, since the outside of the bend
stretches and the inside is compressed, the length at a distance half
way between the inside and outside diameters, i.e. the mean
diameter, will remain unchanged.
Development
Example The cylinder shown in fig. 4.9 has an outside diameter of 150
mm and is made from 19 s.w.g. (1mm thick) sheet. Since the outside
diameter is 150 mm and the thickness 1mm.

mean diameter = 150 - 1 = 149 mm

 giving mean circumference = π ×149 = 468 mm

The circumference at the outside of the cylinder is

 
π ×150 = 471mm
 
Thus a blank cut to a length of 468 mm will stretch to a length
of 47l mm at the outside and give a component of true 150 mm
.diameter
Development
Example Fig. shows a right-angled bracket made from 1mm thick
material. To obtain the development, first find
length ab = 60 – inside radius – metal thickness
= 60 – 2 – 1 = 57mm
next, length cd = 80 – 2– 1 = 77mm
 finally, length bc = mean radius × 1.57
= (inside radius + 1/2 metal thickness) × 1.57
= (2 + 0.5) x 1.57
= 2.5 x 1.57
= 3.9, say 4mm
* total length of development =57 + 77 + 4 = 138
mm
It can be seen that the development of the bracket shown a
fig. is made up of a 57mm straight length plus a bend allowance
of 4 mm plus a further straight length of 77mm, as shown in fig.
The bend is half-way across the bend allowance, and therefore
the bend line must be 57 + 2 = 59 mm from one edge.
Development
Problem
Obtain the development of the shapes as shown in fig. made from
sheet one mm thick and 40 mm width.