I am hoping we have some press brake enthusiasts here. I am a CAD designer who is trying to improve their knowledge of sheet metal forming (mainly air bending on a press brake). The company I work for has recently purchased a press brake to be used for in house prototyping and I have been tasked with overseeing the implementation of it (due to this being the companies first press brake there is no shop floor knowledge or experience I can draw on).

The first thing I want to do is create a document that can be used when designing parts. This is something that can be referred to when designing parts inside Solidworks. I see this document containing the following information,

Punch (top) - XXXX (our top tooling ID)

Die (bottom) - XXXX (our bottom tooling ID)

Material - Stainless Steel

Material Thickness - 1.5mm

Bend Angle - 45degrees

Internal Radius - ???

Bend Deduction - ???

So, I will then know if I am designing a part using 1.5mm stainless steel and add a 45 degree fold I will refer back to my document to find out what internal radius / bend deduction to use.

1. When you take into account the different materials / tooling / angles this is a massive task. Do you think it's worthwhile? I realise that something is required but I don't want to over complicate things. I have found from running physical tests (on 1.5mm stainless) on the machine that I can get parts within a reasonable tolerance (acceptable by our standards) using a k-factor of 0.45 and an internal radius of 1.5mm (i have used this same information on a variety of angles).

2. What is the best process for working out the internal radius / bend deduction? As above I have done physical tests and although working out 90 degree folds is a fairly simple process I don't know where to start when you go above / below 90 degrees. It's very rare that I create a part without an acute / obtuse angle.

Many thanks for any help you can provide.

Paul