Week 9: Bending 6061 Aluminum

Figuring out how to bend aluminum is proving to be the most stressful part of the project. Looking back, if we had the budget to purchase a series of aluminum that is easier to bend (something like a 3000 or 5000 series aluminum) this aspect would be a lot easier. We chose not to utilize a different series of aluminum due to the high cost of those series of aluminum. On Tuesday, I met with Professor Muntz in hopes of utilizing the school's machine shop to produce new rollers for our ring roller. The idea here was that producing a smaller roller would open up the ring roller and allow us to produce the necessary bends. Muntz instead suggested easier ways to modify our purchased ring roller. His suggestions included grinding away some of the side plate material on the ring roller in hopes of opening up the roller more. Although this worked, the produced rings have a terrible surface finish as the ring roller tears into the aluminum rail. What to do when things go wrong? More research! I turned to youtube for inspiration. Utilizing components that were readily available at Superway (and free) I created a "poor man's slip/ring roller". It doesn't look pretty, but it works quite well.