Incremental sheet forming

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Incremental sheet forming (or ISF) is a sheet metal forming technique where a sheet is formed into the final workpiece by a series of small incremental deformations. Generally, the sheet metal is formed by a round tipped tool, typically 5 to 20mm in diameter. The tool, which can be attached to a CNC machine, a robot arm or similar, indents into the sheet by about 1 mm and follows a contour for the desired part. It then indents further and draws the next contour for the part into the sheet and continues to do this until the full part is formed.

A key benefit of ISF is that programming the machine to create new parts is very simple, making it very useful for rapid prototyping.