Kendall Frederick said:275nart said:Thank you fellas! I was there a total of 19 days about 11-12hr days. Wray gave great instruction and helped me on what to do when I got myself into trouble (which was several times). But as he says metal is clay so there's almost always a fix for any goof ups. All the panels were made by me Wray probably spent 20 minutes total touching any of those panels! But that was the goal, to learn and do it all myself.
Kendall Frederick said:I subscribe to Wray's Youtube channel, and I was pretty sure that I recognized this car when the video came out. Haven't watched it yet, will do so now. You did some beautiful work there! I know what you mean on the tool envy, did you use hand tools/English wheel, or does he have bigger stuff like a power hammer?
You probably already know about him, but I've been watching Mike Cornfield's Youtube channel and he's been hosting classes at his shop recently. The work he does is amazing, but he also has some amazing power tools that most of us will never have.Once again, great work, looks like the car is taking major strides toward completion!
Thank you. He has a power hammer but says there was no reason to use it really. The hand hammer then wheel method is faster and easier to read as you're going along, plus it's a lot quieter and you don't vibrate your hands to jello. A power hammer also leaves a hammered finish on the panels instead of nice smooth chromed up look like the wheel.
Shrinking can be done on a stump (there's probably only 2 more panels on the car that will need shrinking) the rest of the shaping can be done on a sand bag with a mallet and then wheeled up. I would like to get a better wheel and a budget upright planishing hammer to dress the welds but my bead roller/tipping wheel and kick shrinker/stretcher will work just fine for all the rest of the work. I do need to make some hand tooling as I go and buy some more small hand dollies etc.
I'm super impressed, and of course I have more questions. :-) Did you buy T0 (dead soft) aluminum sheet, and if so where? Or did you anneal your panels yourself? I have tried a method I've seen from Ron Covell where you coat the panel with soot using an acetylene flame, then heat it until the soot burns off, with mixed results. Flat panels worked great; when I tried it with mandrel bent tubing, not so great.
When I've tried forming sheet that was not annealed first, it wore me out.
I am using 3003 h14 (half hard) and it is great. There isn't a need to anneal these panels to work them. You can anneal the edge to tip over easier (still can tip it 180* without annealing). I found it helpful to anneal the tight corner inside edge flanges where you need to stretch the material a lot to make the flanges. annealed 2x back to back using the method you describe. It also helps to keep the edge of the material from tearing in the stretcher.
