So here’s the deal
Working in virtual reality is all well and good but sometimes you have to mannifest thingin the real world!
Needed to make a number yokes for some wheel casters
Figured we’ll just bend them ourselves (it could turn in to a short production run for prototyping)
Designed the bender in Shapr but then when it came time to cut metal things got interesting
Decided to create templates for cutting out the blanks and for drilling holes (even created center dots for the center punch)
How much easier than having to transfer all the measurements from the drawings!
Well!
We’re prototypeing some exercise equipment that being designed with Shapr
Needed some casters that were off sized and figured to just make them
Thought about buying a proper metal press but figured somethingbthat was jigged just for the casters made more sense
We usually do all our rough “sketching” directly in Shapr, don’t even bother with pen and paper or a drawing app
A lot of times we’ll work with Shapr in split view, the other window might be Photos (for reference materia) or Safari with tabs opened to vendors for raw material
From there we just start building up the shapes to the dimensions of the most common raw material
The steel rectangle tube was 2”x4” and that was perfect for our needs, it also became the shape that everything was designed around
Originally it was designed with the tube having 90° edges but once delivered and noticing that the edges were round we updated the design
This has an impact on the drilling for the through holes
So once designed we started building up the Brake
Nothing fancy as far as that goes (no welding or exotic materials)
Used standard industrial hinges and mostly stuff gotten from HomeDepot/Lowe’s
As far ast the bending went it’s only 1/8” steel, we tried 3/16” and it bent it fine but it was heavier than we needed
Printing out paper templates made shaping the blanks a breeze
We’d just tape the template to the metal and start cutting and filing
In the end the casters fit the wheels perfectly and we didn’t have to purchase a big old press that would have to be configured every time it was needed and would take more hand work than this
Being able to bend both sides without repositioning anything saves so much time!
Happy to answer any questions!
