When we last mentioned how we were lengthening the bed of PileHouse we had just cut the bed apart and braced it to fabricate the new panels. This was not an easy task, but it was made much easier after the project had spawned some new prototype products.
Many of our new product ideas here at Eastwood come from working on our own projects and chatting with customers about theirs. Once I split the bed on Project PileHouse I was at a bit of a loss on how exactly I was going to make the bed extensions to match the original embossing. Even though we have a professional grade metal brake in the shop, it still couldn’t do the bends as close together as needed to create the shape we wanted, and making a buck to hand form the embossing would be extremely difficult and time consuming. This prompted R&D guru and product designer Mark R. to mock up a new vice-mounted (or bench mount) metal brake that has a removable fence that can allow you to make bends as close as 1/2″ apart (exactly what I needed for the embossing on the bed sides!). Within a day’s work with the Eastwood MIG 175, TIG 200, and a pile of fresh steel, Mark had a working prototype made from scratch and we were ready to test it out on the bedside patch panels.
This and a new slip roll Mark designed helped make the bed stretch project go pretty smoothly and our replacement panels were dead matches to the existing bedsides. Check out the video as we go into full detail about the process and keep your eyes on Eastwood.com
in late August when these new metal working tools hit our site!