Sheet metal processing is sometimes referred to as sheet metal processing. The word comes from the English platemetal. Generally, some metal sheets are plastic deformed by hand or die stamping to form the desired shape and size, and can be further welded or a small amount of mechanical processing to form more complex parts, such as the chimney, tin stove, and car shell commonly used in families are sheet metal parts.

Sheet metal processing is called sheet metal processing. For example, the chimney, iron bucket, oil tank, ventilation pipe, elbow reducer, Tianyuan place, funnel shape, etc. are made of plates. The main processes are cutting, bending, forming, welding, riveting, etc., which require certain geometric knowledge. Sheet metal parts are sheet metal parts, that is, parts that can be processed by stamping, bending, stretching and other means. A general definition is parts with constant thickness during processing The corresponding parts are casting parts, forging parts, machined parts, etc. For example, the iron shell outside the car is a sheet metal part, and some kitchen utensils made of stainless steel are also sheet metal parts.

Generally, the three most important steps of sheet metal processing are shearing, punching/cutting and folding.

1.1 The first step is blanking (also called blanking). Generally, the on-site workers will cut the appropriate size of part materials from the large plate by the plate shearer according to the development drawing provided by the technical department. If it is a press, the dead zone of the clamp must be considered. After blanking, workers will mark the material number on the surface of each piece of material with a marker.

Note: There are also some factories that do not have this processing step. They directly type on standard plates and then press/cut directly.

1.2 Then the material will be sent to the CNC punch/cutting machine for punching/cutting process. In this operation, NC (Numerical Control) code needs to be compiled for the processed parts. At present, most machine tool manufacturers will provide automatic programming software (almost all domestic manufacturers cooperate with foreign software companies for OEM sales, so they do not have their own software R&D team), which greatly facilitates programming engineers. The factors to be considered by the stamping/cutting programming engineer are the utilization rate of sheet metal, tools, efficiency, accuracy and other issues. After stamping/cutting, the part will be removed from the micro-connection and then sent to the bending machine for bending.

1.3 In the bending process, the main considerations are tool selection, bending order, bending compensation, bending interference, etc. Usually, bending programming software is also sold at random. However, most CNC bending machines in China are still manually programmed, often relying too much on the experience of teachers. On the other hand, the domestic manufacturing process requirements are still a certain distance from the foreign countries, so the efficiency has not been improved, and the performance of CNC bending machines has not been brought into full play.

1.4 Finally, according to the product situation, welding, polishing, painting, assembly, packaging and other processes may be carried out, which will not be described here.

2 Overall, the sheet metal industry has developed rapidly in recent years. This is mainly due to the following reasons.