Designing & Building the Sheet Metal Brake

Book excerpt: The Sheet Metal Brake is also known as book 7 from the best selling 7 book series, 'Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap'. I almost left this one out of the series and I would have if it were not for my friends who tell me they are always wanting to bend some sheet metal for a project. This one uses no castings. It’s a welding project using standard structural steel and common hardware items to build a compact portable bending brake. Its a 15" brake as detailed but you can scale up or down in size within limits. Definitely not a heavy duty brake but you can make neat bends in 26 gauge metal to form duct, boxes, drawers, belt guards and dozens of items for your shop projects Some have beefed up the leaves and pivots so that metal as heavy as 20 gauge can be bent sharply.