I recently discovered that kerf bending is perfect for building small cases.
Take a pice of plywood, cut out a pattern along the curve you want to shape and apply some hot water to the outside face of the bend, et voila. The cuts weaken the integrity of the material making it able to bend without snapping. Well, I tried some more patterns…
For the transmitter case I tried dashed patterns. Unfortunatly the cuts were too far apart. The bend was under a lot of stress. I decreased the spread and it now bends very well.
pliability: very good
tensile strength: good
torsonal strength: good
normal strength: very good
This is a herringbone pattern. It does work quite well. I underestimated the waste of the laser so the pattern breaks in some areas.
pliability: good
tensile strength: very good
torsonal strength: very good
normal strength: very good
Here is a good old midevil cross pattern. It’s a little hard to bend but once it’s in place it holds up nice.
pliability: fair
tensile strength: good
torsonal strength: fair
normal strength: good
This is the diagonal cross pattern. I would’t reconment using it. It bends really hard and breaks very easy. The biggest problem is, it doesn’t evenly bend due to its diagonal grid.
pliability: very poor
tensile strength: good
torsonal strength: fair
normal strength: good
Here is my favourite one made out of a few rows of space invaders. It is very delicate but in the end it does bend.
pliability: fair
tensile strength: good
torsonal strength: poor
normal strength: poor
You can actually use whatever pattern you like as long as the pattern isn’t diagonal to the bend. Just tinker around a little. It all works to some extend. The problem with these tests is definetly the size of the bend. The radius is only 8 mm. The space invaders are a little too small for the laser I used. I could see this being awesome in a bigger scale.
If you want to try it yourself here’s the CAD file.
