Bodywork and Sheet Metal Work - Heavy Metal

Step1: Cut It
1. First of all, when you're making a replacement panel, you're going to start out with a stock sheet of steel, and it will need to be cut down. To make nice, clean, straight-edge cuts, an air shear will get the job done. Measure out your sheet, place the metal into the shear, and line it up with the blade, then release the shear, and voila, you have a new straight-cut edge.

2. An air-powered reciprocating saw will help you cut large areas fast, but remember it doesn't make for a clean cut. It leaves edges that are jagged and it tends to distort the metal if the blade locks up in the middle of a cut. To prevent that from happening, make sure you lube the blade with cutting fluid. This type of saw also rattles the material, so get a good grip on it or anchor it down with a clamp.

3. If you want a clean cut with good maneuverability, then a set of tin snips will help, but make sure you buy a good, quality set. The cheaper ones dull quickly and tend to warp the metal as you cut it. Tin snips are a more economically priced tool and will get the job done. The downfall of it is that it doesn't have much leverage and it takes some serious muscle to work it.

4. Better than tin snips but hard on the wallet is a Beverly Shear. This tool may set you back a few bills, but the job will definitely be less strenuous with one of these babies. The benefit of it is that it mounts to a stationary table, and you can rotate your sheetmetal stock in your hands. With simple pulls of the lever, you'll be cutting with precision and speed.

Step 2: Bend It
1. Use your meat! One of the cheapest and easiest tools to use is your own body. You can use your fingers, limbs, or whatever you can find useful to bend shapes into your steel. You have complete control over the donor metal, and you can get a one-on-one feel of how to shape. Just remember that sheetmetal can be very sharp and protective clothing is helpful in avoiding accidents.

2. Let's say you want more of a straight-angled bend like a 90-degree angle in the sheetmetal. That's when a box and pan brake will come in handy. To operate, lift the upper beam, then place your steel in, lower the beam, and pull up on the lower apron to bend your sheet to the desired angle.

Step3: Shrink It
1. If you want a good, smooth curve in a piece of steel, then shrinking is a good option. The simple table-mounted tool uses two teeth that grip hard to your sheet and pull the material together with leverage of the handle. Then, you pass your metal through the tool and shrink each section, evenly. Note that this tool only works with angled pieces and will not work on shaping flat surfaces.

2. If you aren't working with an angled piece and need some shrinking for flat areas, then a Pullmax is what you are looking for. It's a big machine and takes up some room, but it has many uses like straight-edge cuts with a nibbler bit, making beads with dies to strengthen flat pieces, and shrinking with the thumbnail dies in place. Shown here is the thumbnail die that will repeatedly pound on sheetmetal to give it that shape.

3. On this sample piece, we will be adding a curve to it. Since we shrunk the other angled side, we now need to match the other. Once the angled side was shrunk, it left us with excess material to work with on the flat side. To shrink the flat side evenly, this pattern was made, since it will be the guide to follow on the Pullmax.

4. Here we go. The machine is running and the steel is slipped in. We followed the pattern and the sheet is now shrunk to our liking. This machine is fast but is not perfect and the stock will need to be flattened.

Step 4: Shape It
1. Now that the piece was freshly beaten in the Pullmax, it has some rough high and low spots on it. To take these out, we grabbed an inexpensive sandbag and a Slapper tool to work the highs out. To do this, take the Slapper and give the metal some strong whacks with a good swinging wrist motion.

2. The slapper and sandbag method is a rough way that will help to get the bumpy shapes out. On the other hand, a Planishing hammer with a low crown die will help the process out by beating the surface down to a respectable smoothness. The diameter of this die matches up with the size of the shrinking die on the Pullmax. The great thing about this portable table-mount hammer is that it will hit the metal more times repeatedly with less pressure than a heavy tool like the Pullmax. That being said, this tool will help you slowly smooth out the highs and lows with less chance of mis-shaping the piece.