The wrong tools for the job can cause more damage than help if you aren’t careful. When working on sheet metal a wrong swing of a hammer, the wrong hammer and dolly can cause damage to your panel that will take 3-4 times as long to fix. You ALWAYS want to match your hammer face and dolly to the shape of the panel your working on. If you’re working on a flat panel this isn’t ever a panel, but as soon as you get into a corner, a curve, or a hard-to-reach area you may need to go outside your simple starter kit of hammers and dollies.
Tag: Metal Shaping
How to Tighten up a Weld Seam on a Patch Panel.
No one’s perfect, but we can do our best to strive to get the closest we can get to perfection every day. These ideals are the same whether you’re a cook, a machinist, a landscaper, or a guy in his garage building an old car or motorcycle. One big lesson I’ve learned over the past few years has been to slow down and take the time to make sure that parts fit together as nice as possible before welding. Just blindly rough cutting a piece and trying to make it fit another piece is going to end with an uneven weld seam and won’t end well!
Tech Tip- How to Move a Bent Edge
On my Model A project I channeled the car down over the chassis which required me to build new floor supports and pans. The way I built it all up I needed to make 6 small pans that would fit down in between each supports. This meant I had to nail the bends on either edge so the final inside measurement allowed the pans to drop down in between the supports tightly. I will have to take the pans in and out throughout the rest of the project so I wanted them to drop in and fit snug, but not so tight I needed to use a hammer to force them in (this could also bow the panel).
The Sorcery of Tuck Shrinking Sheet Metal
The simplest way to describe how metal moves or reacts when you shrink or stretch it is to imagine pizza dough. When you stretch the dough out to make a larger pie you’ll see it gets larger AND thinner as you stretch it out. If you watch the process they start with a small, thick, round piece of dough that they kneed out until the dough is the desired thickness and put the excess material on the edges for the “crust” The same if they wanted to make the pie smaller, you’d need to gather the dough together creating bunches and smooth it all together until it was the desired shape. Metal reacts almost EXACTLY the same.
How to Make A Free Tuck Shrinking Fork
You may not realize it, but many of our Eastwood tools are dreamt up and prototyped the same way you build things at home. We have a problem or see a need for a tool to help do a job right and we build something ourselves. I recently needed to shrink the edge of a panel that was on a vehicle and I couldn’t get a shrinker stretcher on it to shrink. An alternative method is to “Tuck-Shrink” the area and use a hammer and dolly to shrink the metal into itself. I decided to make my own homemade tuck shrink tool from some old tools for free I had laying around and show you the process.
How to Keep Metal from Warping While Bead Rolling
If you have a bead roller, and you try to add a wide or deep bead to a thin piece of metal; or multiple beads to the same piece, you will find the metal starts to deform. You may get perfect beads in the piece you are working on, but it suddenly looks like a metal potato chip. That is because the bead roller does not necessarily stretch the metal as it presses beads into it. If you have an English wheel you can fix this problem before you begin. This problem is especially bad when rolling beads that don’t go all the way to the edge, or rolling different length beads in the same panel. Follow along as we show you a simple way to keep your panel straight when bead rolling.
5 Sheet Metal Projects to Get you Work in Aluminum
Aluminum is one of those materials that a lot of beginners and DIY guys and gals in our hobby tend to shy away from, especially sheet aluminum. The reality is that once you have an understanding of how it reacts when shaped and welded, it’s a beautiful material to work with and it can be formed into complex shapes much easier than steel of the same gauge. It also saves weight and can be mirror polished without rusting. Today we’re going to focus on 5 projects you can do yourself to get your feet wet in Aluminum work.
Tips to tuning up your metal fab tools.
You change the oil, rotate the tires, wax your car to keep it in tip-top shape right? Well why not your tools? Metal fabrication tools get used hard and often we forget that they need maintenance to keep them working well. I put together a handful of tips that will help you keep your tools cared for.
5 Easy Ways to Strengthen Sheet Metal
When you get a piece of flat sheet metal it tends to be very weak and it can be bent quite easily. So if it is so weak, why do we use this stuff for the bodies of our cars? Why not a heavier metal like metal plate? If we did that our cars would all be styled like and as heavy as a tank! This means none of those beautiful curves you see on classic cars (I don’t want to live in that world!).