Aluminum Alloy For Bending Sheet Metal

3003 definitely isn t fun for drilling or any other sort of operation involving edge cutting tools.

Aluminum alloy for bending sheet metal.

This series is one of the most preferable for forming applications. Series 4xxx are the aluminum silicon alloys. The alloy 5052 h32 may bend well enough for my use and shows about 50 higher tensile and yield. Bending is one of the most common sheet metal fabrication operations.

The aluminum series ability to bend tends to decrease as you move down the list of tempers from annealed to t4 and t6. Also known as press braking flanging die bending folding and edging this method is used to deform a material to an angular shape. The best aluminum alloys for bending come down to series 3xxx and series 5xxx and sometimes series 6xxx. 4140 is usually pretty malleable in general you ll always want it to be annealed if you re planning on bending it or else it ll crack.

As a general rule the machinability of any aluminum alloy is inversely proportional to its formability. Wildly variable unless you know the exact alloy. With an addition of 1 manganese these alloys have no significant loss in ductility good corrosion resistance and very good formability. Bending these tempered alloys is not impossible but it is very difficult and will most likely require large bend radii to avoid cracking on the outside of the bend.

Series 3xxx are the aluminum manganese alloys. Miserable to bend cracking is very common and cold bending will always weaken the metal.