How To Mill Inside Sheet Metal

Help choosing best setup for milling pockets in sheet metal box.

How to mill inside sheet metal.

The most practical hand tool for making more than a few limited cuts is the throatless beverly shear. Once the rollers are in the correct position the mill is ready to roll down the metal. These cutters are used for cutoff operations and for milling deep narrow slots and are made in widths from 1 32 to 3 16 inch. You can find your bend allowance with the following formula.

The metal slitting saw milling cutter is essentially a very thin plain milling cutter. The indexable inserts remove material from the surface of the sheet metal part by fast rotation. I suppose the absence of coolant makes it a whole lot easier to secure but results in a poor finish. π 180 x b x ir k x mt bend allowance ba where b is the angle complementary to your desired bend angle 1 to 180 degrees mt is the thickness of the material ir is the inside radius and k is the k factor.

The sheet should be supported in one hand whilst the other turns the handle thus drawing the sheet through the rollers. Normally sheetmetal is machined on a cnc punch and it s not too practical to mill it due to fixturing issues. The most trouble seems to come from trying to hold the workpiece as rigidly as possible. I found that only a fraction of a millimeter could be milled at a time i listened to.

Metal slitting saw milling cutter. But i know many of you have done this successfully. The kinds of pieces i d mill would be 6061 0 063 aluminum about 7 square or smaller. These inserts are made of extremely resistant steels which have far higher hardnesses than the workpieces to be machined.

Put on ear defenders and ear protectors switch on and carefully plunge milling slightly into the aluminium. We build an operator control panel for our equipment that requires milling a pocket out of a sheet metal box for a joystick. It is ground slightly thinner toward the center to provide side clearance. The milling is carried out by tools that are fitted with indexable inserts.