Category: Sheet Metal industry

A coil of cold-rolled steel sits at one end of the building. A crated cabinet leaves at the other. Between them are about a dozen operations, and server rack fabrication is the whole of that sequence. This article walks the line station by station, and…

Search for the best metal enclosures and you get a list of companies. That is not an answer to the question you asked. Two enclosures can share the same IP rating, the same steel grade and the same external dimensions, and perform very differently in…

The AI boom is discussed in terawatts and hundreds of billions of dollars. Right now the data center supply chain is stuck behind something much smaller: sheet steel, copper bar, and the people who know how to shape them. Electrical equipment is a small fraction…

In a hazardous area, an enclosure rarely fails across a flat panel. It fails where the geometry changes, and that is the corner. A poor corner costs three things at once: lost gasket compression, a leak path for moisture and dust, and a certificate that…

Most enclosure faults do not start on the flat panel. They start at the corner. In electrical enclosure design, the corner is where two bends fight each other. It decides three things at once: whether the flange tears on the press brake, whether the gasket…

Three numbers cover most of it. The mounting width is 19 inches, or 482.6 mm. One rack unit is 1.75 inches, or 44.45 mm. Depth is whatever the manufacturer decided. Standard server rack dimensions are usually presented as that short list and left there. This…

You know what electrical enclosure door fabrication costs you per door. Do you know where the minutes go inside that number? Most shops track the total and lose the detail. A door runs through eight or nine operations, and three of them usually account for…

Nearly all common sheet metals can be cold formed. Sheet metal cold formability is a question of degree: how tight a radius each one tolerates before the outer surface cracks. So which sheet metals can be bent without cracking? All of them, at some radius….

Specify a radius that is too small and the metal cracks on the outside of the bend. Specify one that is too large and the flat pattern, flange dimensions, and assembly fit all drift out of tolerance. The sheet metal bend radius is the inner…

Sheet metal fabrication turns flat stock into finished parts through seven steps: design, material selection, cutting, bending and forming, joining, surface finishing, and quality control. Each step constrains the one after it, which is why the sheet metal fabrication process steps are worth understanding as…