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When “tooling up” your press brake for either a new project or your new machine for production, a lot of thought must go into the development and tool selection to ensure you spend your hard-earned money on the best press brake tool that will achieve the quickest, most effective ROI.

Before any press brake tools are considered or purchased, you first need to take a deep dive to ensure the tooling you purchase is correct for the job, providing the greatest effectiveness and efficiency.  Skipping these steps and questions will create more unforeseen issues and costly fabrication mistakes.

What is the Most Important Question when Choosing the Best Press Brake Tool

The number one question when choosing the right press brake tool is “how many parts are you planning on making?” Short- and long-term production must be considered before purchasing a tool that could cost more than the job can deliver in profitability.  Once you know the number of parts to be manufactured, you can do some simple math to determine the per-piece tooling cost, how long it will take to attain your ROI and start making even larger profits from the tooling.

After determining the cost-to-tooling profitability ratio, we can move on to the technical questions. These will determine whether the tool can produce the desired parts and whether there are any other underlying manufacturing hurdles that should be factored into production costs.  Often, estimators forget or overlook secondary operations such as removing distortions, adding welds, deburring, and other manual part adjustments that may be beyond the reach of tooling solutions.

It’s the little things that count. For example, material thickness variances and material grade must be identified immediately. While we often focus on material thickness, material type can be overlooked. With such a massive range of material types, it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to bend a part that simply cannot be bent due to cracking, grain direction, inadequate radii and a poor understanding of your equipment’s capabilities. These capabilities include items such as machine tonnage limitations, machine open, close, and travel specifications, and machine throat depth.

What are the 10 Key Questions for Choosing the Best Press Brake Tools

Here are the 10 key questions that cannot be overlooked when developing standards, customs, or modified standard press brake tools for your machine or particular application:

1. What is your budget for the project or package?
2. How do you nest your parts? What considerations do you need to give to grain direction?
3. What is your minimal flange? (This one gets overlooked far too often.)
4. How does your minimal flange align with your desired inside radius? Do the V-openings of the dies allow for the correct inside radii, minimal flanges and the tonnage required in your current machine?
5. What is the tallest flange you will be forming? Does your current machine have enough “daylight” to produce your parts?
6. What is your tallest “down-flange”, and are your dies tall enough? Will tall dies interfere with the shut height capabilities? Do you require die extensions to make the tallest down flange? Will there be any collisions with the ram, bed, frame, or backstops? Will my backstops raise high enough for a tall die set-up?
7. Does the die or punch need to be relieved to clear any protruding features, such as hardware, embosses, louvers, or extrusions, from the sheet metal part?
8. When forming an electrical enclosure, how large do the ears/horns have to be to clear the return flanges at the top of the box before forming the final bend? Custom ears/horns are overlooked far too often when forming boxes.
9. Should you buy tall tools or supplement the punch heights with extensions? What will be more cost-effective and more diverse for bending your part mixes?
10. Do you need specific fractionalized tools for inside-window bending and hemming?

Of course, this list doesn’t cover every question or aspect of choosing the best press brake tooling for your operation. A tight bond and connection must exist among the design, engineering, and manufacturing departments when developing parts to be manufactured on the shop floor. Creating a checklist for these departments ensures that jobs are properly quoted to maximize profits and avoid costly mistakes.

Collaboration is the Key to Selecting the Best Press Brake Tool for the Job

Each job is unique and requires both the customer and the Mate salesperson to dig deep in partnership to ensure the best tool for the job is selected. Mate is here to help you learn more about increasing your productivity and reducing your downtime through innovative tooling solutions and challenges.

Contact your local Mate representative to help tackle your most difficult challenges today!