1. What is sheet metal?

Sheet metal is metal, in sheets. It’s thinner than plate metal (.25 in and thicker) but thicker than foil (.006
in and thinner). It’s most commonly available in steel and aluminum, in various gauges (thicknesses). It’s
available with various coatings for corrosion resistance or surface finish. Sheet metal is made by taking
a large cast ingot and rolling it into a long ribbon of the desired thickness. This long, flat piece of metal
is then rolled into a coil and sent directly or cut into sheets before being sent to a machine shop.
2. What Is It Good For?
Sheet metal is great for large, durable parts with relatively few features. They make good RF shields and
ground planes, and thicker gauge parts are great for adding strength and weight to things.
3. What Is It Not Good For?
Sheet metal isn’t so good for very small parts, complex or very precise geometry, highly cosmetic parts,
or lightweight parts.
Different Types of Sheet Metal Operations are:
Shearing Operation
Blanking & Fine Blanking Operation
Punching Operation
Piercing Operation
Perforating Operation
Slotting Operation
Notching Operation
Bending Operation
Sheet Metal Cutting Operations
1. Shearing Operation: Shearing is the process of separating the sheet metal into two or more pieces,
normally by cutting along a line. Commonly used to cut into rectangular shapes but can produce other
shaped parts.

2. Blanking & Fine Blanking Operation: Blanking is the process of cutting out a predefined shape from
the sheet metal; the part that is punched out is known as the blank and is the required product, the metal
left behind is waste. Fine blanking is similar but provides more accuracy, with smooth edges and no
distortion by applying clamping force and using small and close tolerances.
 3. Punching Operation: Punching is the same process as blanking, but the required product is the metal left
behind, rather than the part that is punched out. It uses the same punching press and punch and die
operation; it is just the opposing desired product.

4. Piercing Operation: Piercing is the process of cutting small, cylindrical holes in the sheet metal whilst
removing very little quantity of material. This is done by using a bullet shaped punch during the punch
and die operation.

5. Perforating Operation: Perforation is a similar process to piercing, but the holes are not usually round
in shape. Perforating commonly consists of more than one hole that has been punched in a pattern.

6. Slotting Operation: Slotting is the process of cutting rectangular holes onto sheet metal, sometimes
unfinished.
7. Notching Operation: Notching is the process where shapes are cut from the edges of the sheet metal;
removing and trimming and creating notches at the edge.

Sheet Metal Forming Operations

Forming operations cause stress below the sheet metal’s ultimate strength, resulting in distortion.
Bending Operation
Bending is the process of transforming the straight sheet metal into a curved form. There are a number of different
types of bending such as:
• Channel Bending
• Offset Bending
• Edge Bending
• U-Bending
• V-Bending
Sheering: Sheering is a process of converting large sheet into small sheet by cut along a line. It is used to cut
sheet into several parts. Mostly is used to cut rectangular parts but any other shape can also be cut. The edges
form by cutting perpendicular to the plane of sheet. The clearance between punch and die play major role in
determining the shape and quality of the sheared edges.
Blanking: Blanking is an operation of removing a piece of metal from a large sheet by punching with a predefine
shaped punch. The removed part is called blank and it is the useful part and rest sheet is scrap. This process is
used to cut gears, jewellery and complex parts.
Punching: It is similar operation like blanking except, the desire part is sheet and the blank is scrap. This process
takes place on punching press. The negative allowance is provided on the punch which gives positive tolerance
on sheet.
Fine Blanking: This process is used to produce very smooth and square edges blank. In this process sheet is
locked tightly at accurate place. It involves clearances of the order of 0.5 – 10 mm and dimension tolerances are
order of 0.025 – 0.05 mm in most cases.
Piercing: It is a punching process in which a cylindrical hole cut from the sheet.
Perforating: More than one holes cut on a sheet is known as perforating.
Slotting: It is an operation of cutting rectangular hole on a sheet.
Notching: It is a process of removing various shapes on edges. It creates notches at edges, hence named notching.
Sheet Metal Design Guidelines
The section below contains examples of some design guidelines for sheet metal. These guidelines may help
companies to avoid rejections and rework due to engineering errors leading to higher cost of quality and delay
in the delivery to customer.

(Fig 1) (Fig 2) (Fig 3)

Minimum Distance from Extruded Hole to Part Edge (Fig 1)

Extruding metal is one of the most extreme pressure applications in press working and generates lot of
friction and heat. If an extruded hole is too close to the part edge, it can lead to deformation or tearing of the
metal. It is recommended that the minimum distance between the extruded holes to part edge should be at
least three times the thickness of sheet.

Minimum Distance Between Extruded Holes (Fig 2)

Certain distance should be maintained between two extruded holes in sheet metal designs. If extruded holes
are too close it can lead to metal deformation. It is recommended that the minimum distance between two
extruded holes should be six times the thickness of sheet metal.

Minimum Distance Between Extruded Hole to Bend (Fig 3)A certain distance must be maintained
between extruded hole to bend to avoid metal deformation and fracturing. It is recommended that the
minimum distance between extruded hole and bend should be three times the thickness of sheet metal plus
bend radius.
 (Fig 4) (Fig 5) (Fig 6)

Minimum Hole Diameter(Fig 4)

The diameter of the hole in sheet metal part should not be very small, small holes are created by piercing
operation and for manufacture small holes, small sizes punches are required. Small hole size in sheet metal
requires smaller size punching tool which may leads to break during the operation. It is recommended that the
diameter of the hole should be equal or more than the thickness of the sheet metal.

Maximum Embossment Depth(Fig 5)

Embosses are small, shallow formed projections on the surface of stamped parts. During this operation,
stretching is the main deformation mode resulting in high tension. Thereby the metal is subject to excessive
thinning or fracturing. Consequently, the depth of the embossed feature is restricted by the material’s thickness
and ability to stretch in addition to the emboss geometry. It is recommended that the maximum depth of
embossment be less than or equal to three times material thickness.

Minimum Bend Radius(Fig 6)

Minimum bend radii requirements can vary depending on applications and material. For aerospace and space
applications, the values may be higher. When the radius is less than recommended, this can cause material flow
problems in soft material and fracturing in hard material. Localized necking or fracture may also occur in such
cases. It is recommended that minimum inner bend radius should be at least 1 times material thickness.

(Fig 7) (Fig 8) (Fig 9)

Curl Feature Guidelines (Fig 7)

Curling sheet metal is the process of adding a hollow, circular roll to the edge of the sheet. The curled edge
provides strength to the edge and makes it safe for handling. Curls are most often used to remove a sharp
untreated edge and make it safe for handling. It is recommended that:
• The outside radius of a curl should not be smaller than 2 times the material thickness
• A size of the hole should be at least the radius of the curl plus material thickness from the curl feature
• A bend should be at least the radius of the curl plus 6 times the material thickness from the curl feature
 Hem Feature Guidelines (Fig 8)

Hemming is nothing but to fold the metal back on itself. In Sheet Metal hems are used to create folds in sheet
metal in order to stiffen edges and create an edge safe to touch. Hems are most often used to remove a sharp
untreated edge and make it safe for handling. Hems are commonly used to hide imperfections and provide a
generally safer edge to handle. a combination of two hems can create strong, tight joints with little or minimal
fastening. Hems can even be used to strategically double the thickness of metal in areas of a part which may
require extra support. It is recommended that:
• For tear drop hems, the inside diameter should be equal to the material thickness.
• For open hem the bend will lose its roundness when the inside diameter is greater than the sheet metal
thickness.
• For bends, the minimum distance between the inside edge of the bend and the outside of the hem should
be 5 times material thickness plus bend radius plus hem radius.

Notch Feature Guidelines (Fig 9)

Notching is a shearing operation that removes a section from the outer edge of the metal strip or part. In case,
distance between the notches to bend is very small then distortion of sheet metal may take place. To avoid such
condition notch should be placed at appropriate distance from bend with respect to sheet thickness. Notching
is a low-cost process, particularly for its low tooling costs with a small range of standard punches.
Recommendations for Notch Feature:
• Notch width should not be narrower than 1.5 * t
• Length of notches can be up to 5 * t
• Recommended corner radius for notches should be 0.5 * t

Must-Follow Sheet Metal Design Guidelines

Based on some standard design for manufacturing practices, thorough analysis of results and changing industrial
requirements, following are the design guidelines that you should be following to improve your sheet metal
design.

1. Modules of rupture
A sheet metal’s ability to withstand stress in a flexure test is an essential facet of sheet metal design. Depending
on the process adopted for bending, the K-factor in the area of bending is usually visualized. In the course of
bending, the outer surface of the sheet metal witnesses more strain than the inner surface. Bending the sheet
metal beyond a point would result in cracks on the outer surface. This point is named as minimum bend radius.
A sheet metal designer should always conceive design ideas with minimum bend radius relating to the thickness
of the sheet metal. In case of design intent with increased minimum bend radius, the sheet metal would need to
undergo various processing such as polishing or grounding.

2. Structured grooves, hole and slot

Punching is an economical modus operandi for creating holes in a sheet metal. A basic rule of thumb while
considering such design is to make provision for a minimum hole, slot or groove size. In such a case,
manufacturing becomes easy requiring minimum (and error-free) punching, eliminating the prospects of
breakage. An important design tip is to make provision for holes whose diameter is equal or more than the sheet
metal thickness.

3. Minimum Sheet Metal Bending Radius

 This is controlled by the tool and process preferred. The
ductility and inner bend radius of a sheet metal is inversely
proportionate to each other. The nature of several grades of
sheet metal needs to be always taken into consideration in
the course of designing. A Design for Manufacturability
software often takes all these factors into consideration,
proposing an accepted industrial standard accommodating
the design idea of a designer.

4. Fabrication alternatives
Sheet metal, depending on their end use, often make use of variegated processes. Welding is one such process
which may require rigorous grinding. In such a case, the designer must leave sufficient room to accommodate
this fabrication option.

5. Minimum Flange Width

Flanges make the process of creation of a sheet metal part quick and convenient. In the course of
conceptualizing a flange, the following should always be taken into consideration – Flange width must never be
less than four times the thickness of the sheet metal

6. Welding
Most sheet metal designers include a provision for brackets in their design, not having weighed the available
alternates. Is welding an absolute necessity or cutting the base material would lead to similar end results as
well? Can mechanical fasteners help you achieve similar design goals? Efficient and simple design with
minimal cost is the final goal for all designers!

7. Wiping die bending

Edge bending is one of the many processes of sheet metal. While this process has many advantages, failing to
use this effectively can give rise to unwanted complexities. At the time of drafting a design with bend forming,
make provision for angles less than 90 degrees as it would entail less cost and minimal use of complex
equipment.

LASERING
Industrial laser cutters are the bigger, much more powerful (and expensive) cousins of our own Mindtribe Boss
laser. Instead of a shop-friendly size and power, production lasers are multi-thousand watt behemoths capable
of vaporizing half-inch steel plate with .005” precision. It’s awe-inspiring and frankly a bit terrifying. These
machines also often sport auto-load capabilities and blazing fast cutting speeds.

Because of the nature of laser cutting, you can only cut straight-sided holes into parts. That means a lot of the
cool 3D features available on punched parts (extruded holes, louvers, jog bends, bumps, etc) can’t be achieved
on a laser. On the plus side, lasers require no tooling. Because there is no tooling to break, the minimum hole
size is limited only by the size of your laser beam, not the thickness of your material. It should be noted that
there are a variety of materials that are hazardous to cut on a laser – painted and galvanzied metals can produce
gaseous cyanide or chlorine, which needs to be properly treated and vented. Lasering is also usually more
expensive than punching, which makes it a good method for low-volume, highly detailed parts, but less good for
higher [Link] parts are priced by machine time – the more features you have and the thicker your
material, the more expensive your part will be.

BENDING
At low volumes, flat blanks from a punch or laser are bent using a press brake – a hydraulic press that squeezes
two jaws together with dozens of tons of pressure. They can be fitted with a wide variety of tooling to produce
different bends. For low volumes, several alignment fixtures will be set up along the length of a press, and
an operator will manually align and form each bend in your part.
SOME GENERAL NOTES
1. Everything starts with a blank – All sheet metal parts (well, almost all of them) start out as a blank. A
blank is a pattern of holes and features cut into a flat sheet of metal, which will then be bent up into a
sheet metal part. Sheet metal is much easier to work with and transport when it’s flat, so shops want to
do the bends last, as much as possible.
2. Everything is dependent on thickness – The thickness of your sheet stock determines the strength and
weight of your part, and your minimum bend radii, punch size, and flange length. We’ll dig into all of
that in a bit, but for now let’s just note that it’s hard to make small things out of thick metal. On the
other hand, if your part is large and you need more strength, just increasing your material thickness is an
easy design change.
3. You can’t make a part bigger than your sheet – Sheet metal comes in sheets, which means you can’t
make a part that’s bigger than the sheet that you start with. It seems obvious, but when you start
designing and wrapping metal around corners, it’ easy to forget and run out of sheet. Luckily, you can
usually just get a bigger one – most vendors can handle sheets up to 48”x96” or even larger, so unless
you’re making something REALLY big, you’re probably fine. If your part is larger than 96” long, then
you probably want to start looking towards something like extrusion, roll forming, or joining separate
parts together.
PUNCHED FEATURES
There are a wide variety of features that can only be fabricated by punching. We’ll take a look at some of my
favourites here, but first, some general notes about punched features.

Punched features are created by punches, and punches are constrained by physics. The rule of thumb is that a
punch should be at least twice as thick as the material it’s penetrating, which means you can’t have holes in
your material that are narrower than twice your material thickness.

Punch direction is important! Punching and stamping leave a rounded edge where the tool enters and a sharper
or more ragged edge on the opposite side (like a bullet hole, but much less dramatic). If one side of your part is
going to face towards live electrical wires, assembly workers, or puppies, the sharp edges should probably point
the other way. If you’re going to polish or powder coat the edges of this part later, you don’t need to worry
about punch direction, but you’ll have to pay for the finishing.

Any feature that isn’t a straight-sided hole will need to be punched from a certain direction (something like a
countersink, extruded hole, louver, knockout, etc). Once these features are punched, they stick up out of the
material, and can hit the head of the CNC punch machine. Machine shops, understandably, want to avoid
this. There are some clever ways to get around this, like bending a flange 180° after it’s punched or ordering a
custom, reverse-direction form tool, but they’re much harder than just punching all your features the same
direction.

PUNCHED FEATURES

• Extruded holes are the sheet metal equivalent of a screw boss. They can be tapped later, and readily
accept self-tapping screws.
BEND FEATURES
Though they’re expensive, bends are what give strength and shape to your sheet metal parts, so they’re
incredibly important. Here are some general guidelines for all bend features.
Sheet metal can’t be bent to a perfectly sharp corner, so your bends will always have a radius. The smallest
bend radius you can achieve is usually about the thickness of your material. Smaller bend radii cause stress
concentrations in your part, and also require sharper tooling, which is difficult to maintain.
The minimum flange length for a bend is three times your material thickness. This should intuitively make
sense. If you try to bend a flange that’s the same width as your material thickness, there’s no way to grab the
metal in order to bend it.

Recommended Please don’t.

There are several different types of bend features, with tradeoffs in expense, usefulness, and precision.
• Standard bends are just that – a bend in a piece of sheet metal. I’m noting them here so I can compare
other things to them.

This is a reasonable bend. Keep on jogging!

• Jog bends are two standard bends right next to one another. They’re useful for changing the height of
your parts, adding a locating feature, or adding strength to parts. Because they’re so close together,
special jog bend tooling can be used to form both bends at the same time, effectively giving you two
bends for the price of one.

• Hand bends are a way to cheat and get bends for free. By punching a row of slots in your part, you create
a line where the part will bend, and an assembly technician later bends the parts to their final shape. This
lowers the cost of your parts, though it will increase your cost of assembly labor, but usually results in an
overall savings. The bends you get are imprecise and weaker than a standard bend, but they can be left
flat or bent up, which is handy if you need multiple configurations out of a single part. This is also a great
hack for prototyping, if you want 3D parts out of your router, laser, or waterjet cutter.

Hand bend, before and after forming. A hem!

• Hems are created by bending a flange of your part back on itself. This increases the strength of the
hemmed edge and also gets rid of any sharp edges, which your technicians (and possibly your future self)
will thank you for. The downside of hems is that they’re expensive (they usually take three bend
operations to form) and add weight to your part.
 • Cross-breaks are shallow bends across a wide, flat face. They give the part slightly more height, which
stiffens it and helps it resist buckling. If your parts are less than 12” to a side, you probably don’t need to
worry about them, but for larger parts, they can make a big difference.

Cross break on the HVAC system of the Mind tribe building

CHAMFERS AND FILLETS
Unfinished sheet metal parts are sharp. Like, real sharp. And often heavy. You can use the corners of
unfinished sheet metal parts to cut open boxes, if you don’t have a box cutter laying around. In the time before
Mind tribe, I literally sent one of my co-workers to the hospital by leaving a prototype on their desk. It may
seem silly, but chamfering your parts is actually a big deal.
Chamfering the outside corners of your parts removes the sharpest parts – it doesn’t remove all the danger, but
it mitigates the worst of it.
Why chamfers and not fillets? A few reasons – a chamfer can be punched with any square or rectangular tool,
but a fillet requires a special tool with the right radius. Because toolpaths don’t always line up perfectly,
sometimes your fillet tool punches out extra material, which leaves two tiny, sharp 90° corners instead of one
large one. Hardly any improvement. A misaligned chamfer tool just gives a slightly larger or smaller chamfer.

Deceptively dangerous. Better Hardly better

Sheet Metal Design
Metal Selection
Major considerations for the metal selection are the types of metal and their thickness. Protocase Inc. offers a
variety of standard materials as standard offerings including Cold Rolled
Steel, Stainless & Galvanneal, Aluminum and Copper.
Bending Metal and Bend Radius
Sheet metal enclosures are fabricated by 'cold forming', where the metal is clamped and bent in machines called
'press brakes'. As a result, metal typically cannot be formed into a true 90 degree corner. Instead, the corners are
[Link] degrees of curvature can be achieved, and it is described by a parameter called 'bend radius.'
Note that bend radius is specified as the radius of the INSIDE surface of the bend.
Bend Radius Diagrams:

Fasteners

Fasteners Full Product Lists:

 Self-clinching Stand Offs

Self-clinching Nuts

Self-clinching Studs

Self-Clinching fasteners are threaded nuts, studs, or standoffs that are mechanically pressed into sheet metal to
provide solid fastening points.

Welding

Welding Diagrams:

Depending on your sheet metal design, you may desire spot-welded enclosures or fully seam-welded
enclosures. With many enclosure designs, such as our standard U-shape (clam shell), no welding is required.
One section of the enclosure contains small flanges with self-clinching nuts and the other section of the
enclosure is fastened using mechanical fasteners such as machine screws or sheet metal screws.

Spot welding would be used in cases where disassembly is not required. Fully seam welded edges may also be a
requirement, especially if the application requires a more tightly sealed enclosure. Protocase offers both spot-
welded and fully seam-welded enclosures.