On Forming Sheet Metal Parts in Single Curvature with English Wheel

As trade patterns have shifted to high variety and small batches, metalworking techniques used in metalcraft have been reconsidered. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to study one of these techniques, the English Wheel, which can produce a curved sheet metal part by pulling and pushing the sheet, clamped under a pressing force, back and forth along the working path between the roller and the anvil wheel inside a giant C-clamp. In this study, SPCC sheets were used to form parts with a single curvature. As a result, the curvature of the parts formed by the English Wheel was measured and determined by a 3D optical digitizer and approximated by its circumscribed circular cylinder. The curvature of the part formed by a sawtooth path is the same as the superimposed curvature of each part formed by individual parallel paths decomposed from the sawtooth path. Based on these findings, this study then provides a processing scheme for forming with English Wheel, which is validated by the finite element method on an example with a given curvature.