The Art of Sheet Metal Design: Tips for Accurate Bending

Allowance Calculations
Written by: Suvo edited by: Lamar Stonecypher updated: 8/24/2010
Taking accurate sized developed sheet metal initially is extremely important to reach the accurate final
sheet metal product. This sheet metal design guide will talk about calculation of accurate developed
length by calculating bending allowance and K factor.

Typical Sheet Metal Bending Process

Sheet metal bending process can be briefly jotted down as:

Developed sheet metal size is obtained from drawing.

Developed sized sheet metal is cut out from large sheet by punching
operation.

Bending brake is used to bend the sheet metal piece to the required
shape and angle.

Bending Allowance Calculation

Bending allowance is the input for calculating developed sheet metal size. How? See the snap below:

If you have a sheet metal bending product (as shown in above picture) with two legs of length X" and
Y" and you unbend it, you will see that total length of the unbend sheet will NOT X + Y rather, the
length will be X + Y + BA. Where BA is bending allowance.
The formula for calculating sheet metal bending allowance is (Please refer to the above picture):

BA= Bend Angle * (/180)* (R+ K factor* T)Eqn.1

Where,
BA is Bend allowance.
Bend Angle represents the angle to which sheet metal has bend (here it is 90 degree).
R is inner bend radius.

K factor= t/T.Eqn.2
So, if you got K factor value now, you can easily calculate bending allowance.

Calculating K factor

There are standard charts available with sheet metal design handbook for calculating K factor (ideally
it should be 0.5). But the most accurate way to find out K factor is reverse engineering of a small but
same sheet metal sample piece. Procedure is as below:

Now by referring Fig.1 and Fig.2 we can write:

X= X - (tan (A/2))*(T+R)..Eqn.3
Y=Y- (tan (A/2))*(T+R)Eqn.4
Since, all the items of right hand sides of the Eqn.3 and Eqn.4 are known so we can get the values
of X and Y of the sample.

We also know the developed length of the sample (P).

By doing P (X+Y), we can get the bend allowance (BA) for the
sample.