You change the oil, rotate the tires, wax your car to keep it in tip-top shape right? Well why not your tools? Metal fabrication tools get used hard and often we forget that they need maintenance to keep them working well. I put together a handful of tips that will help you keep your tools cared for.
Tag: Metal
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!).
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.
MIG Welding Duty Cycles
When you are using an arc welding machine, you will need to understand what its duty cycle is as it will help you preserve the life and quality of your tool. On this page, you will learn about what a duty cycle is and how it is relevant to MIG […]
Street Rodder Road Tour 51 Ford Custom- More Metal Work, Filler, and sanding.. lots of it!
The crew at Honesty Charley and Street Rodder Magazine have been doing a great job of keeping the 2013 Road Tour car under wraps. We’ve been bugging them for a while for some teasers and they finally shot us a few photos to keep us enticed. As we mentioned in […]
We have a Brake Pedal and The Firewall Becomes Three Dimensional
In the last update I was working on cutting out metal to make the firewall and mocking up my new brake pedal setup from Speedway. Since then I’ve been pretty busy making something from nothing. I had to initially tackle how I was going to mount the brake booster and […]
Eastwood Basics to Metal Buffing Tech Demo Q&A Answers
We recently held a live tech demo on the basics to buffing metal. I gave some insight on the basics, tips, tricks, and safety when buffing. We had a great response for the Q&A and ran out of time to answer all of the questions. I wanted to answer all […]
Building Bumper Brackets To Take Abuse
I must admit that when it comes to my projects I have A.D.D, especially one as large as Pile House. Sometimes life gets in the way or we have other projects going at Eastwood (like our Project Resolution Mustang), that I can only devote small amounts of time or maybe […]
Patching Fender Rot
It seems like all we talk about when working on Project Pile House is the rust and body damage it has.. but again today we’re covering the repair of more rust that’s on the truck. This time it’s on the sides of the fenders where the cab mounts attach to […]