Making a Pan Brake "Folder with fingers" for home by simso
The user simso at woodwork forums published a great thread on a Pan Brake he made http://www.woodworkforums.com/f65/making-pan-brake-folder-fingers-home-45792/
Overview
Okay, just a quick overview of what were dealing with here. Grahame posted up recently a topic about handiest tool you’ve made for metalwork, I posted a pic of my panbrake "folder with fingers" and through Pm’s from people wanting more info, I have decided to start a thread with step by step guide to how to make one. This will take a sheet of steel up to 600mm wide and bend 1.6mm mild steel nice and sharply. If you want to be able to bend thicker steel sharply then you can and Ill point out which bits need to be beefeir as I go along. For the purpose of this exercise Im actually going to help a local mate build one and Ill organise photos on the way, so that way you can see whats actually involved in them. Theres a bit of welding a bit of milling and a bit of lathe work, if you don’t have access to a mill, lathe or a 20 and 25mm drill bit then I recommend maybe getting the bits laser cut out, Ill give you a rough costing of how much these cost as well.
Total cost of unit in materials 2 years ago anyway wont go over 80 bucks, if you get bits laser or plasma cut then maybe 150 all up, not bad when you consider a commercial unit of this strength and quality will cost you around 1600.
What can I bend with this unit, well I use this for making my own tool boxes at home and I restore old cars,so as you can imagine for restoration it is absolutely unbelievable. I made one for a mate who works in the panel and paint business, he uses this unit every day just to make the rust replacement bits for the cars, and were talking from mazdas to mercedes.
A lot of the shape to these bits is purely asthetical, I made my very first unit out of square edges act, worked great looked like crap. But it worked, its your call.
I lost all the computer files a while back "hard drive crash", I have my original hand drawn ones and some printed cad drawings, so I may take a while with some of the photos pics as Ive got to redraw them.
