[DGguitar]

Hello , I do not know a whole lot about metals , I am building an electric guitar and the leg rest will be made of "Im guessing" an aluminum alloy of some sort because of its lighter weight and strength.

here is my issue: I need to bend the alloy a specific way I have included my rendering of the guitar with this post so you can see the thin aluminum bar.

Which alloy should I use I was thinking 6061?, How should I bend it? the dimensions of the bar will be about .25" thick x 1.25" wide x 16 " long. Do you think .25 can be bent easily by hand will it cause problems when resting against the leg?

[doorknob]

6061 does not bend well, rather it is prone to cracking.

There are other aluminum alloys that are better suited to bending. One that I am familiar with is 5052.

I don't think that it will be easy to bend 0.250" aluminum by hand, however if you take into account the lever action of the fret bar, there would potentially be more force available. You can find 5052 aluminum at a Lowes store if you want to do some experiments (I have bought 0.125" thick 5052 bar from Lowes, but I'm not sure whether or not they carry it in 0.250" thickness).

[DGguitar]

I do not know what you mean by Fretbar , Do you think a bar of the dimensions I listed would be heavy?

[doorknob]

My guess is that the weight of such a bar would be less than half a pound.

There is a metal weight calculator at Online Metal Store | Small Quantity Metal Orders | Metal Cutting, Sales & Shipping | Buy Steel, Aluminum, Copper, Brass, Stainless | Metal Product Guides at OnlineMetals.com

I entered the following info into the calculator as a starting point:

Aluminum 5052 alloy, flat shape, 1 piece, .25 inches gauge, 1 inch width, 16 inches long.

The calculated weight for that piece was 0.388 pounds.

As for the fret bar, I was just speculating that if you think of the neck of the guitar as a lever and you inadvertently use it to pry the curved aluminum piece against another object such as the floor, the mechanical advantage gained by using the guitar neck as a lever arm would allow more force to be applied to the aluminum piece than you could easily apply by hand (that is, by working directly on the aluminum piece itself). Whether or not that would be a concern is a calculation that would be above my pay grade.

I am still a little bit unsure whether your concern about bending the aluminum by hand is related to the possibility that it might not be strong enough to withstand the forces caused by normal handling of the guitar, or whether you were asking about the practicality of fabricating the curved piece by hand bending.

[DGguitar]

Well my number one concern is the handling of the guitar and how it will impact the aluminum. I mean I can imagine dropping the guitar on the aluminum guitar would cause some bending. Do you think maybe I should go for the .32 " thickness than? Or .25" would be good enough. Because the weight wont pose an issue any longer if its that light.

[doorknob]

I don't have sufficient mechanical engineering background to speculate about that.

There are folks on this forum who do have such a background (as well as access to FEA simulation software) who might be able to give you some guidance, so hopefully one of them will jump in here.