If you mean 1/16" mild steel it's usually not too difficult with a vice and a soft hammer if the shapes aren't too intricate. I'd just try it and see. Of course ally's easier if you can use that instead.

Edited By Mick B1 on 17/12/2017 18:52:39

Black hot rolled mild steel bends easily, the bright drawn strip with sharp edges will crack if bent to 90 degrees, cold rolled bright sheet usually bends easily, I do not know if it is still available but a long time ago rolled bright strip about 6 inches wide and up to .125 thick could be bought in varying conditions of hardness,when making prototype printer parts the trick was to saw a bit off the end of the strip and try to bend it,to make sure the stores had not cocked up the markings, it could be very annoying to make some part and then find it cracked on bending.

As I understand it Normalisation is done by heating steel to the point where the grain structure breaks down and reforms with much smaller crystals by by allowing the steel to cool slowly in air. The purpose is to reverse ill-effects due to earlier heat treatments or the production process: these can leave steel with large grains, ie weaker, harder to machine, stressed etc. Normalisation wipes the slate clean, producing steel that's softer and tougher. Once returned to a known state, it can be confidently hardened & tempered again.

Annealing is a slower and more costly version of the same process. By cooling the steel extra slowly in an oven, the crystal structure can be made even finer.

The two processes are similar, and some books I've read confuse the two, usually by saying 'Annealing' is done in air or implying Normalisation is a steel-works process. Maybe the difference is a bit technical for most purposes – Normalisation is just Annealing to a basically acceptable state. I suspect what goes on in home workshops is normalisation rather than true annealing but that's good enough for most purposes.

Dave

Mild steel can’t be hardened and tempered like higher carbon steels or alloyed with other elements.. The stresses are confined mostly to the surface where the metal has been deformed, so affects cold-rolled steel and not hot-rolled.

BMS can bend awfully if the surface skin is machined from one side. So cracking is likely due to the surface stresses being further ‘shoved around’.

Heating to a suitable temperature for an appropriate time will certainly allow crystal structures to ‘even out’ and surface stresses to be relieved. Continued bending of hot-rolled strips, while cold, will cause cracks eventually, unless the new stresses are relieved and the crystal structure can relax.

So it is the cold rolling process which causes the problem and further cold bending simply exacerbates it.

Whether stress-relieved BMS is as stiff as when cold rolled might depend on how hot it gets. Too hot and it will certainly be no stiffer than hot-rolled.