Corrugated steel strips: Where to buy? How to make?

[Peter Dow]

i knew a small engineering firm who attempted to make their own machine that would bend corrugated metal sheets into a curved profile. they spent a lot of time,made a huge machine and got nowhere.

Well Rigidal and their supplier (more on them in a minute) certainly offer to bend corrugated sheets in both directions. I don't need the sheets bent just a particular size of corrugations.

The corrugated sheets available from Rigidal are manufactured in Germany by MN Metallverarbeitung Neustadt GmbH, their wellTEC Cladding Sheet range.

So I did get an aluminium sample of W-4/10 through the post and I would show you but I can't post images.

So that is 1mm thick aluminium and it looks like a very well engineered product as you might expect from Germany.

I asked for a quote for W-4/10 in stainless steel from Rigidal. Rigidal offered only 1mm thickness in stainless steel and their quote for 1 sheet 1500mm x 1200mm was £700 plus VAT including delivery to Aberdeen, Scotland!

Which is three times more expensive than the market price of a similar sheet of stainless steel without those spe******t corrugations and perhaps given a more common finish, mirror polish or a common perforation maybe but Rigidal would not negotiate on the price.

So next I did a google search to try to find Rigidal's suppliers who weren't named on their website and that's when I discovered the reason for the sample sticker being in German and so I contacted MN via their website to see if they would improve on Rigidal's quote and next day a saleswomen from MN phoned me which was nice and explained that a lot of this extra cost for small quantities is the set up cost because these spe******t sheets are corrugated to order, not supplied from stock.

MN do actually supply other standard thicknesses, such as 0.8mm which would suit me better for this W-4/10 profile and a thicker than 1mm thickness, which I can't remember what that was exactly 1 point something mm I think.

The sales lady hinted that a better quote might be on offer and suggested contacting their named foreign partner in England a company called Cadisch MDA. I'm still waiting for a reply to my emails to Cadisch.

So more information but still not a quote at a unit price per sheet that I can afford.

[bobby p]

i knew a small engineering firm who attempted to make their own machine that would bend corrugated metal sheets into a curved profile. they spent a lot of time,made a huge machine and got nowhere.

[Peter Dow]

Well 5 years later I have found a company which seems to offer a wide range of corrugated sheet metal.

I came across the Rigidal company's website while looking for someone to supply me with sheet metal of small-size corrugations for light fabrication or craft work for projects I do myself from time to time.

Rigidal seem to be a long established company with many projects for the construction industry to their credit.

Rigidal's range of Creative Profiles has been created in order to allow the designer total freedom of expression. Whether they are sinusoidal, trapezoidal, zig-zag, or combinations of all three, the Creative Profiles can also be perforated and embossed in an endless variety of patterns.

Manufactured in custom shapes, sizes and colours they bring a new dimension to creative floor, wall and ceiling design, as well as colums or canopies - indeed anywhere that can benefit from a fresh approach to the design of metal cladding. The only limit is the imagination of the designer.

And that is where I come in because I am not short of imagination and design ideas. Getting them built is the harder thing!

Have you seen the very wide range of sheet profiles they offer to bend the sheet metal to? Very impressive!

I would show you but

You are only allowed to post URLs to other sites after you have made 25 posts or more.

Note that five years ago I was allowed to post an image, but now the forum rules have changed. In 5 years this forum has become too restrictive to be useful. Such a shame.

I am most interested in Rigidal's W-4/10 profile for one of my projects and I have asked their sales people about other profiles as well but I don't seem to be their usual kind of customer and so getting a quote out of the company for a small and uncertain number of sheets of stainless steel of this or that profile, or a sample in stainless steel, is not easy.

What I would really like would be to walk down to B&Q or Homebase or other local store and see those profiled metal sheets stacked on the shelves so I could pick and choose the ones I want from time to time.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I could get hold of such exciting materials for my projects? Sure I can keep emailing Rigidal but I get the feeling they have better things to do than answer my emails.

[Peter Dow]

Corrugated (or fluted) steel strips: Where to buy? How to make?

Can you help?

Thanks to ImageShack for Free Image Hosting

The above photograph shows two examples of something similar to (but not exactly) what I am looking to source or make - on the left is a strip of tin-plated mild steel cut from the corrugated part of a tin can, and on the right a stainless steel pastry cutter constructed in part with a piece of corrugated steel strip.

Now, if you start from a sheet of pre-corrugated steel and cut that into strips to suit, wouldn’t the cutting procedure squash the corrugations, particularly if the corrugations were jagged
(/\/\/\/\/\/\/\-shaped) as opposed to gently undulating
(~~~~~~~~-shaped)? In which case, is it better to cut flat sheet into strips and then corrugate the strips using some kind of machine or tool, made or adapted for the purpose?

Also I am wondering who would have a machine to corrugate thin strips of the order of a couple of centimetres wide? Could a jeweller’s rolling mill be adapted with special rollers to do it?

If I could get it made to order, I’d maybe be looking at buying, first of all, 2cm wide strips, made from 0.5 mm thick stainless steel strips and having
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\-shaped corrugations maybe 2, 3 or 4 mm apart ridge-to-adjacent-ridge.

But might it not be easier and cheaper if I can buy something like that ready-made from a supplier? But from whom?

Or if I can afford to buy the tools to make it myself, I’ll do that. However, the industrial corrugating machines I’ve seen advertised on the web are designed for corrugating wide sheets and are way too big and expensive for me to buy.

Anyway, I guess this is a fairly obscure fabrication, so I’m stuck as to who I should even ask about it. I tried the local B&Q hardware super-store but the stamped or perforated sheet-metal they sold was everything but a simple corrugation.

(Corrugated paper is easy to source, corrugated steel, not so easy it seems.)

The local tool merchants, didn’t have a clue how to begin to make it. Simply bashing out the corrugations with a hand-chisel and mallet isn’t ideal. I’m looking for a faster and more repeatable method than that. I am thinking that rolling strips through two suitably exposed intermeshing gear wheels might be possible?

One way or another, can you make a helpful suggestion?

Peter Dow,
Aberdeen, Scotland