Bending notes

Presentation for bending materials.

Image Source: Teenage Engineering

How you display things really matters

This is a mess:

This is quite nice:

Acrylic hot bending techniques

Acrylic is an easy to bend material with reasonably low amounts of heat. Two main techniques can be used: hot gun and hot wire.

• Hot gun:

• Hot wire:

To fix components in place, an equipment like this is useful:

Metal bending techniques

Metals can also be bent, although in this case other techniques should be used. A summary of these is done in this fantastic post in hackaday.

• Slotting: in particular, slotting is an interesting technique to do so, because the material can be later on be bent by hand:

An example of a final product:

Doing this in fusion360

Fusion360 comes with a nice module for sheet bending. It’s called sheet metal. You can find a tutorial here.