sladey wrote:Barry wrote:The main use for the nylon is for the hammer-forming: the two sections ahead of the battery boxes are hammer-formed from one piece of metal, and have no welds in them either. The metal is just floated down over the (primitive) hammerform. Same process for the parcelshelf corner. Note in the above photo, the only parts of the parcelshelf repair section that are fully formed are the areas I knew I would use. That's why it looks a bit 'soft' in some of the more central (middle of car) areas. Basically I get the best shape I can with the nylon, and then go in with various steel tools, all ground to different radii. These are used to chase into all of the detail: there is a formal name for this final finishing process, but it's slipped my mind: it'll come back to me as soon as the P.C.'s switched off
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Thanks for that Barry - so are you saying you've got a metal hammerform and use the nylon to drift the metal most of the way into that hammerform shape and then finish it off with metal drifts/dollies to get the final crispness?
Interesting stuff
Sorry for the slow reply: haven't been on DDK for a week or so!
Yes Mark, that's exactly it.
Another tool made today: quite possibily the saddest yet. I'll post pics up after Richard has had them tomorrow.
Just out of interest, during the last year or so I came to realise that it was ridiculous to keep free-forming a lot of these detail parts. Free-forming is fine for one or two-offs, but it takes ages, is hard on the hands and isn't very repeatable. Therefore I ordered up a few chunks of 6 and 10mm steel plate, and now each time I reach something that I'd normally freeform, I stop 'production', and make up whatever tool I think will do the job. Each one is the same: they take ages, it's very messy and you're not sure it'll work at the end either. As some of them might take two, three or four days to make, and the project sits there waiting, it's a fair investment / gamble.
As it happens, I've only had one not work out, and that was the front inner wing top: it's took three days to make and was a complete failure, and ended up at the scrapyard. I now form it completely differently, and although the process is evolving, it's a work-around that is O.K. for now. The others have been very good though, although I do go back and revisit some of them if a refinement occurs to me, or I think I can get something more accurate.
Overall though, once the mess and hassle of making them is forgotton, they are a delight to use, and very satisfying: much more than free-handing stuff. The lovely thing with hammerforming is that it's so repeatable: if you make ten of something, they'll all be the same.
The downside is that it's a killer on the hands: you have to really give the metal some serious welly to get it to flow, and with, say, the front inner wing repairs, each one represents a good hour and a half of pounding. Your wrists ache for hours. Still, next stage is an electric-hydraulic press ....
Thanks for all of the comments BTW, more welcome than deserved I suspect
. Thread has hit a slower period as I've been dealing with the dash ends, A-pillars and the pedal-box areas: all rather slow and fiddly!
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