What Can Sheet Metal Fabricators Do?
As the name clearly implies, sheet metal fabricators manufacture parts and products made out of sheet metal. In most cases, what they make are components of products as a prime contractor for other manufacturers. Almost anything you see made out of this type of material is produced at fabricator plants.
By definition, it can be any type of metal, although the most common materials for sheet metal fabricators to work in are steel and aluminium. Steel is available on the market up to 3-gauge, which is about 1/4″ thick. Some aluminium is available in slightly thicker gauges. Any flat metal sheets which are thicker are called “plate” and are fabricated differently.
Essentially, fabrication consists of various separate processes, including: cutting, punching (holes) bending, pressing (to make curved parts), welding and finishing. The finished parts can be as simple as a square plate with a hole in the centre, to a complex assembly made of several separate parts that are welded together. Individual parts can range from 1/8″ square to 4′ by 10′ (before bending).
The items which can be fabricated out of this material are only limited by your imagination. You can think of it this way; take a sheet of stiff paper, a pair of scissors, a ruler, some punches, and some tape or glue. Whatever you can make out of that sheet of paper, by cutting, folding, punching, gluing and taping can be made out of metal in a fabrication plant. It may not be made by the same methodology, but the finished product will look like what you made out of paper. They can even make origami animals, although not just by the process of folding.
Of course, your paper model doesn’t allow you to install hardware, such as pressed or welded in studs and nuts. This is relatively common for sheet metal parts, especially cabinets and brackets. Nor can you produce complex curved parts out of paper, such as a car fender, which is pressed from a flat cut of metal.
Fabricator plants are designed for flexibility. That means that the same plant can produce a wide variety of parts and assemblies, each of which is manufactured to meet the customer’s needs. Except in the case of pressed parts, unusual punched holes and welding fixtures, the majority of the work uses standard tooling. This allows fabricator plants to quickly and easily adapt to different design changes.
Jeffrey Nevil writes on a number of subjects including Sheet Metal Fabricators, Sheet Metal Fabrication and Metal Bending.
