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This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. Iron working and the beginning of metal The introduction of ironworking to Greece in the late 10th century BC started the Iron Age in Europe. Da Vinci and the cold rolling mill Leonardo da Vinci produced designs and sketches for a rolling mill but there is no evidence that it was ever actually built.
The Industrial Revolution: a turning point for metal history In the 18th century we get to the heart of modern sheet metal fabrication with the industrial revolution. Low-cost sheet metal fabrication Following the industrial revolution sheet metal was easily produced at low cost. Share this article! Related articles.
Explore More. Content Hub Latest News. During this period the first production lines began to emerge and the hydraulic press was developed. In a Barnsley man called Joseph Bramah developed the first hydraulic press. This is an important tool in sheet metal fabrication and the concept is still used today in fabrication shops around the world.
During the late 19 th century, sheet metal fabrication and metalwork became a more prominent industry. Skilled workers would use press brakes and rolling machines to form metal into a variety of different shapes and forms. As time progressed, so did modern technology which has played a massive part in the sheet metal and manufacturing industry today.
In the British pioneered laser assisted oxygen jet cutting for metals. Up to the four-cylinder configuration already hypothesized by the genius Leonardo da Vinci with the two more external cylinders acting as support to the two internal ones that accomplish the machining, up to implementing the configuration with even 20 cylinders. It is anyway worth making a clarification: rolling, as we know it today, cannot be attributed to a single inventor neither to our genius Leonardo!
Sheet metal working Once obtained the precious sheet, it was necessary to work it cutting a part, and generally, deforming it in orthogonal direction as to the sheet itself, the process typically occurred and still occurs under cold conditions.
Certainly, in the most ancient times, the sheet attainment phase and its machining coincided: a malleable metal was deformed hammering it with stones and simultaneously making it take the wished thickness and aspect. Only towards the sixteenth century, with the possibility of rolling materials, and therefore of obtaining relatively thin thicknesses at low cost, the two phases neatly separated.
The technique has not conceptually changed until our times but it has notably evolved in the cutting capacity in terms of thickness and length, we passed from the manual one big scissors , to the bench one, with a fixed blade and the other manually lowered by apposite levers up to the industrial ones, where the used driving force has evolved like in all other machines hydraulic, steam, electrical.
The punching introduction dates back instead to when, upon demand of road bridge builders, it was implemented the first machine able to execute a series of equidistant holes. Few years later, from this derived the nibbling machine that performs the sheet metal cutting through the execution of very close holes.
Still at the end of the nineteenth century, for the cutting of big-thickness sheet metal, it was introduced the oxyhydrogen torch that used oxygen, hydrogen and lighting gas. They tell that it was used for the first time to burgle a safe! Over the last decades several other cutting forms have been developed: waterjet, LASER, oxygen cutting, plasma cutting etc. It is not the time of telling their history, yet! Forming The sheet metal shaping has been accomplished for thousands of years and it is carried out still nowadays!
The sheet is positioned on metal, wood or metal equipment, which reproduces the shape to be obtained, then through successive hammering it is «obliged» to adhere to the equipment reproducing its shape. The not deep drawing was an evolution notably widespread, even if it is possible that there are older examples, in the eighteenth century. The technique certainly derives from the coining one, known since the antiquity, in which a metal was placed between two dies and compressed by a hammer or power hammer stroke or a press.
The successive step, using the sheet metal, was relatively short, still using two dies the sheet is interposed and they are closed with force by using presses. Obviously, also in this case the sheet metal «must» fill the die but it does it by plastic bending, leaving the thickness almost unchanged that is instead deformed in coining , we might say that the deformation occurs only in two directions. It is worth underlining that die and counter-die are implemented «to respect» the sheet metal thickness.
Great boost to this technology was given by the automotive industry in the first half of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the steam hammer appears, steam was used, for the first time, as driving force to lift the ram and in the following years, with the double-action hammer, also to increase the descend speed Figure 7.
Deep drawing was instead born at the end of the nineteenth century for the fabrication of ammunition shells. The machining cycle provided for Figure 8 the use of a brass strip with 3. Afterwards the latter was annealed and pickled and then drawn again with smaller and smaller dies and punches. In the last stages annealing was not executed to leave the material work hardened and then more resistant.
It was then introduced also the concept of follow dies. The process has been extended also to other uses like the attainment of small tubes with subtle thicknesses but also of pots, washing basins etc. In the successive years the process has remained conceptually unchanged, they have been obviously varied, increasing them, the sizes, the drawing depth, the quality absence of defects of the final product.
Obviously, what here described is not exhaustive, there would be several other things to say and several other technologies of which to narrate the history! Since ancient times it has in fact always played a primary role in all technological progresses, contributing in them but also taking advantage of them. It was able to constantly evolve meeting rapidly the needs that variable socio-economic conditions requested in the various ages, improving, thanks to its flexibility and cheapness, life conditions.
Today, despite the really numerous alternative materials see polymers that have approached the universe of the production engineering, it still plays a fundamental role. We cannot certainly stop, we still expect numerous developments both from new technologies LASER, hydroforming, incremental forming etc. As always: he who hesitates is lost! Tags: history , sheet metal.
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