Magnetic Sheet Metal Bending Brakes

It’s really handy to be able to do some simple sheet metal work around the shop to make brackets, covers, and similar sorts of things. I have wanted to build a finger brake for quite a while, perhaps something like this one:

A “finger” or box and pan brake…

Plans for it are available from the Village Press book, “Metalworking, Book Two, The Best of Projects in Metal.” 

I’ve also considered making a press brake attachment for my 45 ton hydraulic press. They’re easier to make than the finger brake and can be set up to take commercial press brake tooling which is pretty common on eBay. Lots of folks have built these attachments in varying degrees of sophistication:

I have a page where I collected a bunch of these press brake attachments for ideas. There are even moments of total self-delusion where I think about building (or buying used) a full on press brake and then converting it to CNC. It certainly has been done before, and in spectacular style such as this CNCZone thread by Bigtoy302, but that’s probably a long ways beyond my time availability to tackle something like that.

But then I stumbled across this video:

MagnaBrake Magnetic Sheet Metal Brake

It’s pretty easy to see from the video why one of these brakes would be a lot more useful than a conventional sheet metal brake. The interesting thing is it doesn’t look that hard to build one for your shop. Easier, in fact than the finger brake, though more trouble than the simple hydraulic press brake attachments.

The inventor has a site with quite a few details. I’m wondering how hard it would be to apply some simple CNC to one in the form of a motorized bending gage as well as motorizing the bending action.

Do any of you dear readers have experience with the MagnaBrake or similar? Any thoughts you’d like to share?

I’ve started keeping a page to track information on MagnaBrake’s now.

Related posts:

1. Kurt Vises for Sheet Metal Bending (aka Way Covers)
2. Idea Notebooks
3. Awesome Motorcycle Brake Rotors by Braketech, Feeds and Speeds by G-Wizard
4. 4th Axis Disk Brake
5. Homebrew 250W CNC Laser