Designing & Building The Sheet Metal Brake - Book 7

The compact bending brake described herein was originally built as an aid to installing duct work for air conditioning and heating jobs. With it, and a couple of sheets of metal I was able to avoid many costly and embarrassing trips back to the shop. The main portion of the job being made up at the shop, it was a simple matter to make up the final fittings right at the job site. The savings in time very materially increased my production capacity. The illustrated model evolved after several models that were not quite satisfactory. I first tried to do it in a three foot size. While it did the job, it was a lot heavier because of the additional bracing and trusses it required. I found that by reducing the size to 30", I could make it much lighter and more compact. The final product worked so well that I had many requests to sell it to others with the same problem. As a home shop tool it finds so many uses that, once you have one you'll wonder how you were able to get along without it. So many of my metal shop friends wanted a small brake that I decided to do it up into a manual and include it in the "Metal Shop From Scrap" series. The 15" size is illustrated because it is convenient for the purpose of showing the necessary details. Also, the size seems to meet the main requirement of the small home shop. If you need a little larger size, simply add to the length of the leaves. All other dimensions will remain the same. In order to make it a home shop project, the design has been held to simplicity. Capacity and wear adjustments, as found on the commercial big brother, would put the project outside of the scope of the average home shop. It's a fun project that yields a practical piece of equipment at little cost.