Micro-Mark Mini Brake & Shear

One summer, when I was still a callow youth, I got a job making sheet metal HVAC ducts. My first assignment was to beat the duct seams with a hammer to fold over and seal the seams.

My instructions were brief and direct: the foreman pointed to a bench full of unfinished duct work and growled “Beat that s..t together!”

For the first few days, most of the ducts I made were pretty shabby. Some were so bad that a real sheet-metal mechanic had to do them over. By the end of each workday, my legs were aching from standing all day on a hard concrete floor.

Real sheet metal workers, I quickly learned, never sit!

The skin on my chest and stomach was covered with cuts from my attempts to brace the ductwork while hammering the seams into place. My t-shirts were shredded.

And, ironically, although I was making air-conditioning ducts, the shop we worked in was not air conditioned. Actually, it was, but the foreman never turned on the A/C.

  In the summer heat and humidity of Virginia the shop was often well over 90 degrees. Real sheet metal workers (at least back in those days) don’t need no A/C!

As the summer wore on, I got better using the hammer. My cuts healed, the seams got smoother and the experienced guys no longer openly snickered at my work.

Sometimes, if the shop got over 98, the foreman would grudgingly run the A/C.   Another guy, less-experienced than me, had joined the team, so I no longer was in charge of cleaning the toilets.

Life was good!

One thing I took away from that job was an appreciation for the two of the fundamental tools of the trade: the cutting shear and the bending brake.

The shear, like a long guillotine, quickly cuts large pieces of sheet metal down to more workable sizes.

Industrial-duty sheet metal shear

Using a pan-and-box bending brake, the experienced guys could quickly make nice drip-tray to capture excess moisture that would drip from an A/C unit.

Industrial-duty pan and box brake

Sheet metal drip tray

Of course the tools used in the HVAC shop were large and rugged, weighing over 1,000 pounds. Some of the larger shears were hydraulically operated and could cut through multiple sheets of galvanized steel like it was nothing.

Sheet Metal - Small Scale#

Those days are long gone, but working in my home shop, I sometimes come up against the need to cut and bend light-gauge sheet metal.

Until recently, the only sheet metal tools in my shop have been a few pairs of hand-held shears - one each for straight, left-hand and right-hand cuts.

The shears work fine for small jobs where an accurate straight-line cut is not important, but, in my hands at least, they’re not much good when trying to cut a rectangle with sides that are straight and square to each other.

Frequently, when cutting sheet metal, the next step is to bend one or more of the sides to form a lip or a tray.

I’ve done that, or at least tried to, using a shop vise, but the process is awkward and the results are never very good: invariably the bend is not quite square with the edge of the metal.

Then, while browsing through the Micro-Mark catalog one day, I ran across a small combined shear and brake, sized and priced for the hobbyist. Hmmm…, I thought, I’ve gotta try this.

Micro-Mark#

Micro-Mark, in case you’re not familiar with them, sells a cornucopia of tools and supplies targeted primarily at scale-model hobbyists, who work with model trains, planes, boats, cars and such.

Even if you’re not engaged in one of those hobbies, you’ll almost certainly find their wide selection of specialty tools useful for all kinds of shop operations that the home shop machinist encounters.

Where else, for example, would you find a Micro Punch Set?

Micro Punch Set

And, if you’re a regular reader of mini-lathe.com, you probably already know that Micro-Mark sells the top-of-the-line 7x16 mini lathe along with the companion mini mill, both powered by the powerful new brushless DC motors.