Intro
So many people turn to sheet metal design for their electronics parts that they want to be fabricated quickly, affordably, and with the quality that your applications demand. At Rapid Axis, we’ve fabricated countless sheet metal parts over our decades in business, and we’ve seen a trend: there are three very common applications that you might be missing out on when it comes to sheet metal design in the electronics industry. Let’s take a closer look:
Why Sheet Metal Is Popular in the Electronics Industry
Sheet metal is incredibly common in the electronics industry. We’ve worked with countless electronics companies over the years, and we typically recommend sheet metal for a few common reasons:
Easy to Work With
Sheet metal can be really easy to work with. Since the material is so thin, it allows our machinists to use machines like waterjet cutters, laser cutters, and bending machines — all of which can speed up production and make our life a lot easier as a manufacturer.
Low-Cost Manufacturing
Whenever a process is easier for a machine shop, it equates to lower costs for you. Looking specifically at sheet metal, you can save a ton of money on fabrication if our team uses a laser cutter to make all of your parts.
In addition, sheet metal requires a lot less waste. This allows us to make multiple parts from a single piece of stock metal. The result? Even lower costs for you.
The final bit of cost savings comes from the material itself. Since sheet metal is much thinner, it means that there is a lot less metal used in the project. A large piece of sheet metal can be ten times less expensive than a thicker piece of stock metal.
Really Lightweight
As you know, sheet metal is a lot thinner than stock metal and even some plastics, depending on their thickness. This means that the final product can be really lightweight if you utilize sheet metal as much as possible.
As you’ll see in our examples near the end of this article, working with sheet metal is a great option if you need lightweight components that are still sturdy and reliable.
Strong, Reliable, and High-Quality Material Options
Sheet metal design and manufacturing can give you a lot of design freedom. Engineers and designers will often choose sheet metal if they want all of the strength, ductility, longevity, and quality associated with metal, but without any of the negatives such as higher costs and heavier parts.
With sheet metal, you truly get the best of both worlds: formability and machinability that you can only find with plastics, but strength and longevity that is customary with metal parts.
The Top 3 Uses for Sheet Metal Design in The Electronics Industry
Although we’ve made thousands of different parts for the electronics industry, there are three very common electronics parts that we see over and over again: enclosures, panels, and brackets.
Electronics Enclosures
In the world of electronics, “enclosures” is a very vague and general term. It means any protective covering or housing for components. You have a bunch of sensitive electronic parts that need to be held in a certain orientation and protected from rain, dust, and sunlight. The best way to do that? Through an enclosure.
These can be anything from a junction box enclosure to a protective covering around your amp that you’re designing.
Our custom sheet metal fabrication makes it all possible. We can create sheet metal enclosures that meet your specifications and hold tight tolerances.
Electrical Panels
Panels are another very common part that we make out of sheet metal. In this case, you don’t need anything load-bearing or flashy — a panel is just there to keep your operator’s hands away from electricity and protect all of your circuitry, breakers, or fuses.
With an electrical panel, there are some industry-standard sizes, or you can make your own panel that fits all of your electronic components. In either case, you can trust Rapid Axis to deliver high-quality sheet metal parts.
Various Brackets
Another incredibly common part that we make for the electronics industry is brackets. We can’t tell you how many brackets we’ve made over the years, and a vast majority of them were made out of sheet metal.
With sheet metal design, you can create brackets that will hold your panels or enclosures in place without costing too much or being too difficult to machine.
Oftentimes, we can create brackets with a simple laser cutter program and a quick visit to the break to bend the bracket to a 90° angle. Instead of milling out a large block of metal and wasting a ton of time and money, you can allow our team to utilize sheet metal design to fabricate your brackets quicker, at lower costs, and higher throughputs.
Conclusion
As you just learned, there are plenty of reasons to consider sheet metal design for your upcoming electronics projects. If you’re not sure if your project fits into the world of sheet metal, give us a call and talk with one of our manufacturing experts.
At Rapid Axis, we offer high-quality machining, finishing, and high-volume production for all of your electronics industry needs. We’ve helped countless companies just like yours, and we’d be happy to help you with any of your manufacturing requests. Get a free quote today.