Unfolder things manual#

On a hand brake, you need at least two individuals to manipulate a 10-foot piece. “And, yes, at the time it seemed unbelievable that a roofing company that was making their parts on a hand brake would make a relatively massive investment in a folding machine. “The machine’s design really fit the roofing and architectural market,” added Cindy VanderWaal, department manager, sales, at Roper Whitney, Rockford, Ill. The distance determines the radius and can be adjusted for any material thickness the folding machine is rated to handle. In folding, the distance between the clamping and folding beam contact points is analogous to a V-die opening in a press brake air bending operation. “The folding machine made products seven times faster than a hand brake, so it was a no-brainer.

“In the early 1990s we found a market with metal roofers who were essentially upgrading from a hand brake,” Stone recalled.

Unfolder things manual#

architectural fabrication market, a sector that relied a lot on manual labor. Many workpieces in the architectural world also required hemmed edges, which a folder could form without a tool change.īy the early 1990s folding machines finally started to gain a significant presence in the U.S.

If bending on just two opposite sides, folders effectively had no flange height limit (beyond the practical limitations of physically moving a piece in and out of the machine). A typical folder’s design, with the upper beam slanted backward, gave clearance to fold tall, 90-degree flanges. The European standing-seam metal roofing market helped pour more investment into folding technology. A motor would lift the upper beam and another motor would move the bending beam to the correct angle.” “In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Germans started putting motors on. “After the war, the rebuilding in Europe began,” said Geoff Stone, CEO of Peachtree City, Ga.-based MetalForming Inc. At first it was similar to a leaf brake, just with a motorized leaf that swung upward and manual backgauges. Something needed to fill the gap, and for many fabricators, both on the architectural and industrial side, that something was the metal folder. World War II left the continent in tatters, a generation of craftspeople gone. Meanwhile, fabricators in Europe were following a very different path. For this reason, the hand brake dominated the architectural Architectural shops produced large, long parts, difficult to handle on a press brake and not the safest to deal with as they whipped up during the bending cycle. This became even more important as the use of prepainted sheets began to proliferate. Unless a fabricator invested in urethane tape or tools, it couldn’t form a thin, sensitive part without marks or marring, something that architecturally exposed panels demanded. If an operator needed to change an angle, he had to change tooling-not very efficient for architectural panels that could call for many different angles in a single part. Most mechanical brakes used 90-degree dies almost exclusively. The machines performed bottoming that is, the punch “bottomed” to the bottom of the V die, forcing the sheet metal against the die angle.Īrchitectural fabricators didn’t embrace bottoming with the mechanical press brake, and for good reason. On the industrial side of fabrication, the mechanical press brake was becoming the standard. had a massive manufacturing base, built up to feed the war machine, and it had the people needed to do it. market evolve so differently from the European market? The answer involves war and Europeans’ affinity for metal roofs. Germans called it schwenkbiegemaschinen, translated as “swing bending machine.” American fabricators knew it as the folding machine or, more casually, the folder. But its operation did resemble that of a leaf brake, with a leaf (or beam) rotating upward to bend up (and at first, it was always up) a flange. It also wasn’t a leaf (also called hand, or box and pan) brake, long a staple of roofing and architectural fabricators. It didn’t look anything like a press brake, the dominant bending machine of metal fabrication. It hit the roofing and architectural fabrication market first, then gradually made its way to the precision and industrial segments. The technology wasn’t common stateside, though it had by that time long established itself in Europe. In the early 1990s a sheet metal bending machine started having an increased presence in the U.S. An operator runs this machine standing by a U-shaped backgauge table. Tall clamping beam tools and suction backgauges (shown in orange) that maneuver the workpiece allow for the efficient folding of tall adjacent flanges.