The Most Powerful Machine in My Factory Just Arrived

[00:00] Fun fact: it only takes about 1,000 lbs worth  of pressure to completely shear off a human   finger. This tidbit of information will come  in handy later. Here at my wheelchair factory,   of off-road wheelchairs this summer as  we relaunch our redesigned Rig 2.0. And  

[00:18] this machine, secretively wrapped up  in white, is going to help us do it. The brake press weighs about 12,000 lbs. So, we  have this custom forklift—a rigging forklift—which   has a crane on the top. But it's also interesting  that the back of the forklift can extend farther  

[00:33] out to better counterbalance the weight that  we have on the front. Take a look at this   over here. Kind of fun. Pretty heavy-duty  equipment to move heavy-duty equipment. This is what we are trying to build with our  new machine. What you see here is a few of  

[00:46] our one-off prototypes—prototypes that we've been  using for testing and filming for the past year.   Building them one at a time, though,  is slow and rather expensive. So,   just like Henry Ford did with  the automobile back in 1913,  

[00:59] we'll be mass-producing our off-road  wheelchairs to bring the price way, way down. There are about 5 1/2 million people in the  United States who use a wheelchair as their   primary means of mobility. And our goal is  to build enough of our Rig 2.0s for everyone,  

[01:13] which is where our new machine comes in. It's  called a Trump TruBend 2100. And while its   name is rather unfortunate, its abilities  are extraordinary. The TruBend 2100 is a   100-ton CNC press brake, and we can use it to  turn 2D sheets of metal into three-dimensional  

[01:31] Basically, this has the crushing  force of 20 full-size elephants;   but since we don't have the resources  to feed that many elephants, we bought   we have to get our laser-cut parts from inside the  laser. A lot of our off-road wheelchair parts and  

[01:51] wheelchair parts use sheet metal for, like, the  seatbacks and kind of like the frame design. So,   we put a giant 5x10 sheet on this side, and it  gets pulled into the laser where laser beams   can cut out the exact dimensions we need.  The laser is what helps take the 2D flat  

[02:08] sheet metal and gives us a dimensional shape  that we can then make 3D with the brake press. Flat sheet metal is one of the most common  ways metal is manufactured and distributed.   And we can use a literal laser beam to cut out  the intricate shapes we need for the off-road  

[02:22] wheelchairs. Basically, the CNC laser concentrates  a beam of light onto the surface which melts the   metal into a molten lava. Then, high-pressure  compressed air blows the molten metal out the  

[02:34] backside of the cut. Thumbs up for that. It's  an extremely impressive machine. If you want   to learn more about lasers, I did make a whole  video on this guy when we bought it last year. Our wheelchair factory is growing super fast  thanks to you watching our videos. And here  

[02:47] comes all of our laser-cut parts. The sheet  is actually still really hot because of all   the energy that went into making the cuts.  But as you can see, some of the parts are   already coming out of the metal. This piece is  going to become the base of the battery box,  

[03:02] and this will become the lid. They're flat right  now, but not for long. Basically, any shape we   can dream of out of aluminum or steel, this laser  can provide for us really quickly. We can probably   cut out all the individual parts we need for a  single off-road wheelchair in about 20 minutes.

[03:17] Then, it's time to take the parts over to our  press brake. This machine is going to help us turn   flat sheets of aluminum into our next-generation  off-road wheelchair. Creating something out of   nothing doesn't happen by magic, and it doesn't  happen overnight. And really big machinery like  

[03:32] this is what helps make it happen. We got this  machine used for about $100,000. But luckily,   and decided to hook us up with their heated and  cooled massaging office chairs and help offset  

[03:48] a significant portion of the brake press machine.  So, thank you, HBADA, for supporting the factory. These chairs are pretty epic, by the way. It's  called the HBADA X7 Smart Ergonomic Chair. And not   only does it have automatic lumbar smart tracking  to make life easier on your lower back, but it  

[04:03] also has 8D biometric hand massaging built right  in. The chair can auto-massage you after prolonged   sitting with three levels of red light therapy  that heats up deep into your muscles. Imagine  

[04:16] being at a spa while gaming, because that's what  you get with the HBADA X7. The automatic lumbar   support moves with me automatically every  time I change position. There's a magnetic   charger, a 5,200 mAh internal battery for 3 hours  of full-power use, and dual-fan ventilation built  

[04:33] right into the seat to help keep all your bits  cool, and a super comfy zero-gravity recline. of its own. But until then, there's a link in  the description; because if you're sitting down  

[04:46] for most of the day, it's probably time to treat  yourself to something nice. You can give yourself   a promotion with the HBADA X7 Smart Ergonomic  Chair, and the link is down in the description. But let's get back to building our off-road  chairs. We might not have automatic lumbar  

[04:59] support, but the improved suspension makes  up for that. Instead of outsourcing our seat   manufacturing, which could cost us hundreds of  dollars per seat, we build everything here. So,   it only costs tens of dollars per seat. We  have the tooling set up in a way that each  

[05:12] of the operations has its own set of teeth.  Uh, what's interesting is that they call this   top piece the "jaws" and then obviously this  the "teeth." So, it's like a big old mouth   that just clamps down on the metal. So, each  of these stations is a different operation.  

[05:26] And the stops on the back make sure that we're  not pushing the metal too deep into the machine. The CNC brake press knows the length of  the flange that we're trying to create,   and the back gauges make sure that we don't screw  it up. Each of these individual teeth—this one,  

[05:40] the lower portion—is called a die, made out  of hardened tool steel. And then up here,   these are called the punches, and they have like  a little indention at the top which helps them   clip into this groove and hang where we tighten  it with these Allen bolts here. But these allow  

[05:56] us to set how long each of the bends is going to  be, up to a total of 10 ft. So, we could put a   whole flat sheet of steel in here and bend it  at the same time—assuming, of course, that the   bend itself wouldn't require more than 100 tons,  because that is the limit of this brake press.

[06:10] One way to keep all of our fingers intact is a  laser beam system that watches where the tips of   the punches are at. Kind of like the laser below  your garage door. If anything disrupts the laser   beam that's not the punch itself, like a finger  or an arm, the brake press will stop and hopefully  

[06:25] not shear off any of your digits. It's super nice  that the machine does all of the measuring for us,   which saves the operator a lot of time as  we build our off-road wheelchairs quickly. What's interesting, though, about this TruBend  2100 is that obviously dealing with the downward  

[06:39] force of 20 elephants stacked on top of each  other, or the weight of two whole excavators,   the bottom jaw is bound to flex. So, what Trump  has done on their press brake is to hollow out a   cut in the super-thick lower steel plate and adds  reinforcing hydraulics on either side of the jaw  

[06:56] so that it can offset the crowning or bending of  the tool itself. The lower hydraulics compensate   for the natural deflection of the bed, which is  the lower part, and the ram, which is the upper   portion. The amount of flex is predictable, so  the compensation needed to offset that flex is  

[07:13] also predictable. The large hydraulic pump on  top is regulated by two proportional valves   which allow the hydraulic fluid to flow on both  sides of the ram for super precise positioning. It's hard to see with the thin aluminum, but I  got some 1/2-in steel plate that we can also try  

[07:28] bending as well. A 1-ft segment of 1/2-in steel  plate would probably require about 40 or 50 tons   worth of pressure to bend. So, our press is  still overkill for even 1/2-in steel. But,  

[07:40] it's super cool watching our laser slice through  the steel like butter. We are cutting out the   shape of an oversized wrench just for fun  so we can turn it into a wrench bench. The steel wrench is a tad more complicated  to place inside the opening since we don't  

[07:54] have a flat spot on the flange of the  CNC back gauges to reference off of,   but I'll just eyeball the lines we scribed  on the metal and hope for the best. Glorious.  

[08:09] You'll notice that the bottom die we are  using is quite a bit larger this time around,   since the radius or curvature of the metal is  also going to be larger. The punch on the top   is also quite a bit thicker. And the coolest part  that's now easier to see with the steel is that  

[08:22] the press brake actually bends the metal past  the 90° we want so that it will spring back to   the angle we request. Intelligent machines are  extremely helpful, and luckily metal is pretty   predictable. As long as the machine knows what  type of metal it is, it can predict the flex.

[08:38] It's nice. That's a good height. We're  going to have a nice wood seat on it.   You've got to try this. It's nice. I'll have  to add a wood top to our wrench bench later,   but I think it turned out super cool. And speaking  of intelligence, like I mentioned earlier,  

[08:52] it only takes about 1,000 lbs to shear  off a finger. And this machine would   probably be capable of shearing off about 200  fingers all at the same time. We'll have to   save that test for a different video. But  luckily, there's a level of safety with a  

[09:04] laser sensor to keep that from happening on  accident. Protection is always a good thing. we could basically reconstruct society  from scratch or build really cool,  

[09:16] inexpensive off-road wheelchairs. I'll leave a  link down in the description for the HBADA X5,   as well as we are doing pre-orders for  the off-road wheelchair. That'll be down   in the description as well. Thanks a ton  for watching, and I'll see you around.