When the company first fabricated the long, wide panels, it used press brakes to form the bends. "If you try to make a small flange on a large panel using a press brake, it's usually going to take two or three people to support it. Let's say you take a piece of sheet metal, and you want to put a 1¼-inch bend down the length of both ends. On a press brake, you would hold the major portion of it out in front of the machine. All you could do is bend off the very small flange. "Also, the panel is going to rise up on either side, so how well it turns out depends on how well the operator follows the material up, or how well he supports it," Lyons said. "If he doesn't follow it up fast enough, we're going to have what is called back-bending; it'll show a really bad tooling mark right in the form area," he said. "The operator would be worn out by the end of the day." According to Lyons, controlling the width of the doors is critical. "If you're using a press brake, you're only forming from the outside, so you have no control over the width." Other challenges the company experienced were with the properties of the material itself-light--gauge (20- to 22-gauge), polished stainless steel. "Stainless is extremely fragile," Lyons said. "If you scratch a panel, it's scrap—there's no fixing it. If you try to buff out a scratch, it looks worse than the scratch." After the panel is formed, it has to be welded and polished. "You're talking about 22-ga., which is less than 0.030 in. thick. You've got to have an incredibly tight corner. When you weld that corner up, if there's any gapping at all, you'll just blow it away--there's not enough metal," he said. "You have to be pretty talented to weld it too. "You hear about shimming or autocrowning?" he asked. "A press brake's force comes from only two ends, so with a large sheet, you have deflection. There is no deflection or shimming with a folder." In addition, Lyons said that it was time-consuming to change press brake tooling for each gauge change between shorter runs. | 