HOW TO DO IT YOURSELF ON A BUDGET If you’re restoring a vehicle, a major milestone in the process is when you paint the vehicle. At that stage, although still far from finished, the project really starts to take shape. Depending on your skill level and ambition, you may wish […]
Tag: Hammer and Dolly
Best Auto Body Dent Puller
Repairing dents in a vehicle can be a difficult process if you don’t have the correct tools for a job. Understanding where and when to use each tool is also important. We decided to make a list of the best dent pullers for auto body. Feel free to add a comment below of your favorite tools for removing dents!
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).
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!).
How to shave and metal finish your firewall with Empire Fabrication
Shaving or smoothing the bodywork on a custom car has been one of the most popular modifications since the beginning. Shaving door handles and trim or side marker holes are the most common things to shave on a project car, but close behind that is smoothing or shaving the firewall. Sean of Empire Fabrication has gotten REALLY good at shaving and smoothing cars. So much so that his finished projects require basically no body filler at all and can be primered and block sanded straight away. Sean recently took the time to snap some photos and give us the rundown on how he tackles a firewall shave project. The donor vehicle is a VW Eurovan that he has already drastically customized. So grab a drink, sit back, and watch how to do the job right with Empire Fabrication.
Beginners Metal Shaping Project- Making a panel blister.
Metal shaping is one of those things that seems like black magic to beginners. There really is a science behind the process that takes quite some time to learn and understand. The quickest and easiest way to understand how metal shaping works on the granular level is by comparing it to pizza dough. The more you stretch it out, the thinner it gets and the excess material has to go somewhere (in the pizza’s case its the rolled up crust) and the more you shrink the metal the thicker it gets and again it has to “go somewhere”. I decided to demonstrate a great beginner project for gaining experience in metal shaping by making a panel blister out of a 12″x12″x12″ piece of 5053 .035 aluminum. This process is great to help you understand the process and is pretty straight forward.
Dent Repair FAQ
Even with the modern advancements in the art of paintless dent removal, you still need the most basic of tools if you want to handle any and every dent repair. The number one and two tools you need are a good body hammer and dolly set.
How to Paint Your Car- The Basic Steps and Methods Uncovered
Painting a car is one of the most misunderstood parts of our hobby. It can be a daunting process to sand off the paint on your car, but it’s one of those jobs that things must get worse to get better.