what do you guys have? would it be possible to make one inexspensively?

 

Harbor freight has one that does up to 36" in 18 gauge I believe. I have an older 8' finger brake. Just remember you get what you pay for. Look online and watch stuff like Craigs list. I wouldnt bank on making a very good one unless you are able to build to machine tolerances.

 

hmm, true. i ask because i wanted to make some nice coil relocation brackets on the cheap.

 

If it's a once in awhile used item, I would buy a cheap one from a catalog. Depending on the size, harbor & others have a cheap homeowner type. Just don't expect to do 1/4" sheets. Good luck.

The heating guy has a 8' huge one next door, it sure don't look easy to make, sorry.

 

I have directions to build one at home. I will post them later.

 

for what its worth, i made my brackets out of angle aluminum stock from home depot. pretty cheap that way. had enough left over to make a few sets.

 

Put it in the 6" vise and beat it with the big hammer

 

Make sure to cushion the board by putting it between 2 pieces of plywood and then using a wood block to cushion the hammer. I have had good results with this method. If your bending 1/4" plate or thicker skip the wood and heat it up with the torch where you want the bend.

I now have a sheet metal break and it works good, but for small brackets I get almost as good of results with a vice and hammer. I picked up my sheet metal break out of the garbage. Woot someone was throwing it away because it was missing a couple of brackets.

If it is under 1/8" metal you can also use the edge of a workbench to bend it. I still have to do this on brackets over 18" as they won`t fit into the sheet metal brake. Just put the metal so the bend is over the edge of the bench, clamp it down with c-clamps and a piece of heavy angle iron and bend it with hammers, brute force, boards etc...

 

How wide a piece do you want to bend?

For thinner stuff I used to use a setup that I built that bolted to the back of the cast iron top of my table saw, that had right around a 40” capacity but fairly thin stuff.

Since then I built a press brake for my 20 ton shop press that I use for just about everything (I don’t think I’ve bent anything that long ever, it’s not like I do siding or gutters for a living):


It has a 22” capacity, the bottom plate has round bending supports on one side, like you see in that picture (work for most jobs), or it can be flipped over here I have a sharp angle setup for precision stuff, like the side that is up I this pic:


On that side I’ve bent as heavy as 10gauge steel, 17” wide that I used to bend a tray to hold the bottom of 2 shielding gas bottles for my TIG/MIG/Plasma cart, on the rounded side I’ve bent as heavy as 3/8” brackets. Both are clearanced so you can make a bend past 90*.

The top part:

can clamp a die/blade up to 22” wide and 5/8” thick, so you can replace the “sharp” blade that you see here with a radiused one up to that thickness, or wider if you want to weld the radius to the blade, and narrower widths. I have another blade that is cut into “fingers” like you would have on a finger/pan brake, so I can bend into the inside corners of boxes/pans or whatever.

I haven’t tried to bend anything thicker then 3/8” with it (I did use it to straighten some ½” plate that was warped), but for the typical 1/16” – 3/16” steel and aluminum that you make brackets out of it’s pretty much effortless and DEAD accurate (no need for figuring out thickensses to get an exact location for the bend like you do with a normal brake, you just draw a line on the inside of the bend and the bend ends up exactly where you put the blade).

The heavy parts are made mostly of ½” steel, with some thinner pieces and some roll cage tubing, all the pieces were cut out with an angle grinder and then trued up with either the angle grinder or a belt sander (and assorted shop built fixtures to hold angles/straight edges exactly)

OTOH, if you just need a bracket or 2, you can do a perfectly good job by annealing a piece of aluminum, clamping it to a rigid steel edge (easiest between 2 pieces of steel but you could use hardwood also), and then tapping it over with a wooden mallet (I’ve quickly carved one out of a single piece of some 2x6 or 2x8 lumber). The wood mallet will keep you from marking up the surface. Here’s a coil and ignition box bracket that I made like that:


If you don’t anneal the aluminum first you’ll get small stress cracks in any sharp bends you make in aluminum.