If I bend a piece of 1" x 1/8" ms flat into an 'L' shape, how do I make it stay that shape & not bend back when a load is applied?
Would I heat it to 'red', bend it, then quench it in water/oil? Or bend it cold, heat it, quench it?
The usual way is to keep the load applied in use far below the load used to bend it
NT
If it's simply mild steel it's liable to bend back. You'll have to either case-harden it or provide some form of strut to provide strength.
not really a handyman then eh.
If you want to support a very light load, then you can bend hot or cold and it should stay.
If you want to support a medium to heavy load, then flat metal will not support that for any length of time.
But as usual, the qualifier is the length of the bar - the longer the loaded end, the less load it will support before bending back.
As for "quenching" - that will not work on mild steel, the best you can do is case harden it - and you will still not prevent it bending back.
Now perhaps you could tell the group some valuable information such as:
What is it to support? How long are each of the legs? Is the supported piece to be inside or outside the bend?
BTW, this sort of thing should be second nature to you.
Ah well. And I await the usual response from you
You can't, unless you put a brace across to make a triangle or bend it into a triangle in the first place as seen in numerous hanging basket supports. That is the point of mild steel: nice and malleable. Mind you, you are not saying how big this L is wanted to be. You could just cut off an inch of angle iron (drilling any screw holes before you cut.)
On the other hand, as it is only 1/8 thick, you may be able to get enough carbon into it to put some spring on the outside by heating it to red hot and dunking it in sugar or similar high carbon source as per the case hardening thread a week or two ago.
S
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If you can screw one 'leg' to an upright such as a wooden post (to stiffen the metal so that the metal upright can't bend) and apply the load as close to the angle as possible you could lift quite a heavy load before any distortion or unbending occurred.
Cic.
Just look at pressed steel shelf brackets. The strength comes from the moulding of the groove along the two parts of it that give it it's strength.
Dave
Thanks for all the helpful replies.
I was thinking more of a bracket like this
Thinking about this, heating and quenching would do nothing to mild steel, as it doesn't have enough carbon content. Case hardening would make it brittle.
Dave
It certainly bends very easily when red hot. I suspect that the resulting bend will be stronger if bent when red hot. I usually dunk it in water afterwards, just to cool it down so I can hold it. I'm not sure if that affects its strength, probably not.
Case hardening should not make it brittle. Its a composite.. mild steel core, high carbon skin.. it shouldn't be brittle.
Probably does. Probably doesn't have much effect on its resistance to bending.
If it were high carbon steel it would make it hard and brittle. You then need to temper it by heating it to a straw->blue colour before letting it cool.
In message , "dennis@home" writes
"Once I was a forty pound weakling. Now I am two separate gorillas."
Eh, dennis ?
only in the canyons of your mind ...
or, have I lost you there ?
No, it won't. I had a very good grounding in metals and heat when I was starting my engineering apprenticeship. Many years later, in the aerospace industry, I had to drill some incredibly hard steels, with incredibly hard drills. By hand :-(
To cap this for you...
There are plastic and chalk twist drills. Then there comes HSS.
After this comes Cobalt steel drills.
After this comes C1150 which have short cutting shank and long plain shank.
After this comes D200. This is the type I had to use for the very hard metal I mentioned above. A 2.5 mm drill would drill just 3 holes and want grinding again. You couldn't see anything wrong with the cutting edge, but it couldn't cut a hole any more.
After this came the solid tungsten carbide twist drill. Drill though almost anything.
Dave
Rigidity isn't necessarily a good thing: I used zinc plated corner braces to hold picket fence panels I made to their posts. The posts are in metal spike sockets. This is on a bottleneck in a narrow lane, and even though it is kept bright white the posts get hit once or twice a year. Most of the time the braces just distort and allow the fence to move without the wood breaking. Then I wrap a tourniquet around the whole thing and wind it back up again. Irritating but better than smashed.
Also note that if you are bracing the corners of a box you are going to have to bend 4 at once.
S
Straw. Put your goggles on folks
Dave
What sort of load?
If you mean "shelf bracket and upwards", then you need to add some sort of mechanical brace (diagonal, sheet, whatever) because a bend in
1/8" isn't going to hold it. Maybe get a MIG welder and weld something in there...Heat treatment won't help, as it doesn't work like that, and it won't do much to mild steel anyway.
You _might_ find that 1/4" or more is enough to support your load, and that's bendable if you work it hot (but not really cold). It's not really heat treatment though, just a temporary softening while you put the bend in.
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