About Bend Genius & FAQ
Bend Genius is a web-based bending collaboration software used to help align your entire team, from office to production floor, in your bending process. With just four pieces of input data, Bend Genius instantly runs several industry accepted rule-of-thumb logical checks, along with a series of ever-increasing custom developed formulas to provide guidance in the quality of parts delivered, as well as the safety of your team when bending sheet metal parts. In short, Bend Genius acts almost as a bending wizard to help break down the deceptively complex process of sheet metal bending into palatable inputs that allows even the least technically trained to use.
Bend Genius is easy to learn for those with even basic bending knowledge, but is valuable for all skill levels – even your manufacturing engineers will find it surprisingly helpful to have key calculations completed automatically. Bend Genius will help your team bend smarter by:
- Identifying many part geometry errors before they reach the shop floor and become costly
- Minimum Leg Length
- Hole & slot deformation distance
- Inside bend radii
- Minimum offset bend height at a given angle (90-179 deg)
- Identifying the ideal vee die tooling
- Vee Opening : Material Thickness ratio
- Total tonnage required
- Length of tooling in inventory
- Vee Opening Angle
- Identifying if you have enough press brake length and tonnage for a specific application
- Which specific brakes in your shop can be used for this application
- Guiding you to ideal vee die tooling, which will:
- Minimize operator angle corrections
- Increase the lifespan and performance of your tools
- Ensure the safety of your operators during operation
- Account Managers or Sheet Metal Estimators/Quoters
- Sheet Metal Designers
- Manufacturing Engineers
- Press Brake Operators
Account Managers or Sheet Metal Estimators/Quoters
Bend Genius was originally designed for the account managers and estimators in my sheet metal shop. You’re very busy, always under a time crunch to get that estimate to the customer, and you don’t always have time to nit-pick every little detail on a customer design drawing. This is where Bend Genius comes in.
With a few hours of training you can identify the “critical features” of a sheet metal part requiring bending. When you enter those features into the Bend Genius calculator, you’ll know immediately if this part is a no-brainer, or if you'll need to submit it to your Manufacturing Engineer/Bending Professional for a higher level analysis.
A "yes" from Bend Genius empowers you to quickly and accurately quote your part without further levels of analysis – with the ability to get answers whenever you want them, even at 2 a.m., without having to wait for a response from your technical support team. If Bend Genius tells you No? That may not actually mean “no” - instead it gives you a clear red flag for the problem(s) presented in the scenario and allows you to clearly and concisely present your part to your technical team for further review. This can significantly reduce the time spent troubleshooting parts with your technical team, giving you more time to focus on your customers and additional estimates.
Bend Genius will give you the confidence to provide accurate estimates that are within your company's specific capabilities without endless hours of review with your manufacturing engineer. Additionally, it can significantly reduce the number of times you get into a bind for quoting something that your company doesn’t have the capabilities to produce. That’s a big deal!
Sheet Metal Designers
Bend Genius will help you design it right the first time.
Open up the Bend Genius calculator and populate it with values corresponding to the sheet metal you’re using in your design. Bend Genius will give you the technical information you need to make sure that you’re designing your components with manufacturability in mind. The best part about Bend Genius is that these values are calculated using your actual machine and tooling capabilties – or the machine and tooling capabilties of your subcontractor. Some examples include specific vee die selection, minimum leg lengths at a given bend angle, safe distances for hole and slot deformation, minimum offset bend heights at a given bend angle, and more!
Even if you have offline bend programming software, you can waste hours designing something incorrectly before the offline programming software has even had an opportunity to process your components and identify the errors that you'll now have to redesign. It’s just quicker and easier to do it correctly from the beginning!
Manufacturing Engineers
I’m a manufacturing engineer like you. I designed Bend Genius so that my teammates would have a tool to allow them to reliably and repeatedly apply sound technical bending logic to their specific applications - And so they would stop chasing me down with incredibly simple questions all day long!
After creating Bend Genius, I realize that I’m using it as much or more than any of the intended customers! Bend Genius keeps all of my machine and tooling capabilities in one place and automatically runs the calculations that I always used to have to do by hand or in my head – now I don’t even have to try to remember all of these things anymore. Also, I don’t have to worry about accidentally fat-fingering my calculator because I was rushing through my calcs.
Bend Genius knows the length and tonnage capacities of my machines, and it knows all the critical information about my vee dies, including length of tooling available and the angle of the vee opening. When Bend Genius runs a calculation, it tells me exactly why the logic tests failed, which gives me the opportunity to take a closer look to determine whether or not I’m comfortable overriding the calculator and allowing my team to proceed with the manufacturing those components.
I've trained my team to know that if Bend Genius tells them “yes”, they can proceed with the confidence that we can form those parts. If Bend Genius tells them “no”, then they need to come to me for a higher level technical analysis. This method has almost entirely eliminated the basic, Level 1 questions that I used to get on a daily basis – now my team only brings me the real technical challenges that are much more fun for me to sink my teeth into!
Press Brake Operators
Highly educated press brake operators are rapidly becoming a rarity. Many operators have learned basic rules-of-thumb that were handed down through the years - and the truth is that many of these rules are simply not correct.
Bend Genius is a quick and easy way for your brake operators to confirm that the tooling they want to use, or are being directed to use, is safe for their bending application.
If a flat part arrives at your press brakes engineered incorrectly, the brake operator will be forced to make a decision in choosing a vee die that could possibly bring the parts into tolerance, and save your company the cost of re-engineering and re-cutting the components. Most operators do not have the tools necessary to choose the ideal vee die to use in this situation. Many operators have even been trained to simply “lie” to their press brake controller in order to get a part to run on certain tooling.
Bend Genius will show your operators which tools are safe to use, and which tools are not. It can also help your operators see the difference in bend radius that’s likely to occur when changing vee dies, which helps them choose the die that will get the parts in tolerance on the first try – instead of wasting precious time trying every tool in the drawer.
Although Bend Genius has the capability to help multiple members of your bending team, Bend Genius may not be right for everyone. Here are a few criteria to consider:
Bend Genius is right for you if:
- You are air bending with press brakes
- You are using purchased, precision ground tooling (homemade tooling not applicable)
- You are using sheet metal material
Bend Genius may NOT be right for you if:
- You are bottom bending
- You are coining
- You are using homemade tooling
- You are using panel benders, wing benders, other non-press brake bending styles
- You are using predominantly heavy plate (Some Bend Genius settings can be slightly adjusted, please feel free to contact me to discuss if Bend Genius can be modified to work in your application)
Easy! Just send an email to [email protected] - that’s it! We’ll start a conversation to make sure we understand your needs and your application to make sure that Bend Genius is a good fit for you.
We’re working diligently on creating some online training resources that you can show your team for any time use. Until we get those up and running, you’ll get some 1 on 1 training with us! Either way, we can get your team up to speed in a matter of hours.