Epoxy primer serves a wide range of automotive needs, providing quality resistance to corrosion, fast build, exceptional color holdout and strong adhesion to bare metal substrates. This direct-to-metal primer is specifically ideal for use after sanding or media blasting projects due to its filling qualities. It’s also a good primer […]
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How Can I Control Warping While MIG Welding?
Sometimes, if you are welding two pieces of metal together, you might experience a warping of the metal surfaces. Warping can occur either if your material preparation is not performed correctly or if you make certain errors while welding. The three main ways you can warp metal materials when welding are: a lack of tack welds, the materials are not clamped together while welding, and if you have a poor welding technique. Below are various ways you can remedy these issues.
How to Make your barn or garage find road-worthy- Part One Assessing the Vehicle
In the past 5-10 years the buzz words in the automotive hobby are “barn finds” or “garage finds” and “picking”. This is just a car guy or gals way of explaining automotive treasure hunting. The dream is to find an untouched car or parts that’s been stashed away and forgotten in a barn, garage, yard, etc. and you pull it out and put it back into use. There’s practically an entire subculture in the classic car world dedicated to this with shows like American Pickers, Chasing Classic Cars, Backroad Gold, etc making it look like an easy process. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for quite a while and it can be as easy as knocking on a door and handing over a stack of cash, but the process to make these cars and parts usable again IS NOT. Any car that’s been sitting for more than a few years is going to need a LOT of work to get it ready to cruise the streets again. Not only that, there are some key steps you should take to avoid causing damage to the vehicle when trying to get it going.
Project Pile House Shaving and customizing the original dash and glovebox.
While I had the column out I decided to start cleaning up the dash and sort out my brake pedal dilemma on the truck. In order to get under the dash for fabricating the new brake pedal setup and to shave and smooth the dash I needed to pull it out. ….
What is Buffing?
Many people confuse polishing and buffing, and when you are working in the automotive industry, it is important to differentiate between the two terms. Polishing is a process that removes a moderate amount of metal from a metal piece using coarse to medium abrasives in stages. After polishing a piece of metal, the piece will have a “brushed” type of look, and you will not be able to see reflections in the metal. Polishing removes small scratches and minor surface imperfections. During an auto body restoration or repair project, polishing will come before buffing. If you run your fingernail over a scratch on a vehicle’s surface and it gets caught on the scratch, the area should be polished before buffing. Polishing a piece of metal enough will ideally even out the surface nicely during repairs.
What is a Flange Joint and How Do You Perform One?
When it comes to auto body patch panel installations, no joint is more useful than a flange joint. A flange joint is very similar to a lap joint except that the area that is overlapped on one of the metal pieces is lower than the rest, making both pieces at equal elevation when welding. ….
Painting a 70’s Camaro Flat Black with Eastwood’s Help
In true DIY fashion these guys called in favors from friends and kept the project on the budget. They soda blasted the body and then primed and painted the paint with Eastwood Dead Rat Flat Black Single Stage Urethane Paint.
What is a Butt Joint and How Do You Perform One?
A butt joint is a piece where two pieces of metal are joined by their edges with a weld bead using a stitch welder. The exposed edges of each metal piece heat up quickly, so careful use of the electrode is necessary when welding. An ideal butt weld should have […]
Leading a Body Panel The Gene Winfield Way.
Only a few guy from the golden age of kustomizing and hot rodding are still with us, and even less are still working on cars. One of the best is Gene Winfield and even today, well into his 80’s he’s still traveling the world kustomizing old cars and teaching classes about metal shaping, leading, and anything you want to know about custom cars. I was lucky enough to catch up with him at one of his recent metal working seminars to get the process he uses to apply lead to a panel.