Hello Chief Delphi,
Our team is looking for a lexan bending strip. Can anyone recommend somewhere in which we could find one in Southern California?
Thanks in advance
1160
If you need a quick fix, you could use a heat gun on high to do the bending. It’s not as pretty as a strip heater, but it would get the job done.
You can also bend lexan in a sheet metal break as long as you don’t need more than a 90 degree bend. We did that for all of our shielding last year and it is still doing its job just fine as it sits in the corner of the shop. Everything we used was 1/8 inch material, thicker might be tougher but could still work…
Check for a Tapplastics.com store in your area they sell a heater strip for a DIY kit or a ready to go line bender.
You can also bend lexan in a sheet metal break as long as you don’t need more than a 90 degree bend. We did that for all of our shielding last year and it is still doing its job just fine as it sits in the corner of the shop. Everything we used was 1/8 inch material, thicker might be tougher but could still work…
How well did this work? Did you have to heat the material at all or do anything special before hand?
No, lexan is quite flexible; you just have to bend it past the angle you want because of its rigidity. Angles are also hard to get right; I find that the effective bend radius is ~2x the thickness of the lexan when done in a break. It works quite well when done right though.
Heating is only necessary for custom molding (e.g. cylindrical shapes), although it’s very difficult to do (a clean job) without experience.
All of the bends on this robot were done in run of the mill sheet metal break without any prior preparation. I would agree you have to go farther than you want as it flexes back slightly but it is pretty straightforward. As you get closer to 90 degrees you might start to see microcracks appear, but we never had any panels fail (although we never really used them in load bearing situations).
We also bend all of our Lexan on a cheap sheet metal break from Harbor Freight. They are on sale right now for $224. Maybe you can even use a cupon get another 20% off.
That’s good to know, I am rather new to bending material so I really didn’t know what would work (well at least bending precisely/intentionally 
).
One year we used a sheet of lexan & a heat gun & just heated it up as we were wrapping it around a 55 gallon drum.
We then used tie-downs to hold the bent piece in place while we went to dinner & when we came back it stayed in the arc shape of the barrel upon releasing the tie-downs.