Most structured sandwich plates cannot be simply deformed by conventional forming operations. Bendable sandwich plates with a sheared dimple core were introduced to expand the application fields. The core shear strength increased as the gap between the attachment points decreased. This characteristic produces benefits, such as preventing face buckling and core shear failure. U-bending experiments have shown that the designed sandwich plates can be bent successfully with a drastically small relative bending radius (R/H) of 3.33. (C) 2010 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.