Forming Stainless Steel Sheet
In addition elon has specified 3mm thick stainless steel which greatly increases forming tonnages required.
Forming stainless steel sheet. It should also be noted that austenitic stainless steels can t be heat treated meaning that cold forming may be your only option. Another good alternative is duplex stainless steel which combines the properties of austenitic and ferritic stainless steels. An example drawing note might read material. The following is a brief introduction to some of the common cold forming methods for stainless steel.
The punch press is basically open type single moving mechanical or hydraulic transmission with a long and narrow table. At the end of the article we will be discussing different forming methods used with sheet metal. Bright annealed 2r stainless steel sheet without any additional polishing. Pretty much all the common engineering metals are also used in the form of sheets.
These alloys also tend to respond well to cold forming. Previous studies by shinagawa and takuda indicate that warm forming of stainless steel sheet reduces martensite formation when forming at elevated temperatures. Unlike carbon steels work hardening rates for stainless steel mean that more severe deformation is possible at slower forming speeds. Stainless steel sheets are cut into blanks then placed in the hydroforming press one at a time over a punch.
Stainless steel sheet 16 gauge 304 2b. 1 cold bending forming. This makes bending stainless steel with common hand tools difficult and a sheet metal brake is often required although one technique to bend stainless steel using hand tools works well on shorter length bends. We can accommodate a stainless steel blank up to 32 inches in diameter.
Typically the rollers are precision ground with a smooth finish. 3 this publication is intended to indicate selected processes that make optimum use of stainless steel s forming potential. Some of them are carbon steel stainless steel copper and aluminium. The resulting mill rolled finish in the sheet stock is termed 2b as a finish designation for stainless.
Typical automotive skin panels are just 0 65mm thick so 3mm thick is a huge increase in material mass and means the press has to be many times larger to stamp thicker 3mm material. Austenitic stainless steel can be used to produce deep drawn components that require very high elongations and thus stainless steel is widely specified for the production of hollowware. Traditionally cold bending is widely used in stainless steel sheet and steel parts. Hydroforming stainless steel is a cost effective process that results in a higher quality product than die stamping methods can produce.
So elon is wrong about forming stainless steel. The rollers used to finish the sheet emboss the surface finish onto the sheet. Figure 1 shows the experimental setup used by takuda. Studies on stainless steel warm forming.
2 3 these researchers performed drawing tests of cylindrical cups made of types 304 and 316 stainless steel.