DIY sheet metal brake

One of my hobbies is to build electronics projects, like metal detectors for treasure hunting. Usually electronics boards are hold inside a plastic or metal box. There both in the market, but usually they are not so cheap.

One solution I thought about, was to build my own boxes using aluminum sheet as it is a soft metal.

Although aluminum is soft, for the thickness I want to use (2mm) it is not so easy to bend it by hand, so I searched a bit how to make a tool to bend the metal with the less effort possible and with good results at the end, I came up with this, using only 3 pieces of wood, 2 screws with bolts and 2 hinges:

This is known as a sheet metal brake, mine is simple, made of pine wood but I recommend you to use harder woods, specially if you need to bend metals harder tha aluminum.

I think you can replicate one easily just by looking at the pictures above, so I'm not provinding any measurements but if you need, please write a comment below.

For different sizes or formats of sheet you want to bend, maybe you will need to make a different form (the piece of wood in the top, so this one may be changeable).

There are also a lot of improvements that can be done for this tool.

Here is a small youtube video of it working: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7CnaxP_Wi3g

Here are the resulting parts for the box:

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