Automotive Sheet Metal Forming & Fabrication

Sheetmetal forming and fabrication is an essential automotive art. Creating door skins, fenders, hoods, and a myriad of other components from sheetmetal is a crucial skill for restoring many muscle cars, building custom parts for hot rods, and fabricating parts for classic or competition cars. While many specialized and expensive tools are used to form sheetmetal into a functional and finished part, simple metal working hammers, dollies, anvils, and shot bags can be used to create parts with complex curves and crowns. This book shows the inclined enthusiast how to design and fabricate with inexpensive and simple tools as well as how to fabricate parts using more specialized tools, such as an English wheel.

Automotive Sheetmetal Forming & Fabrication provides the know-how for people who are working, or want to work, along the nearly endless learning curve of this craft. It instructs in most of the common processes and operations in sheetmetal fabrication work, the basic ones that you can accomplish with some work, and access to fairly modest tools and equipment. It focuses on how to perform most of the basic operations and tasks used in metal forming and fabrication. Of course, some of the more exotic tools, equipment, and techniques in this field also get attention in this book, but the emphasis is largely on the reliable basics of this work. This volume shows novice metal workers how to apply force and use fine judgment, and through close observation, creativity, ingenuity, and restraint, create almost any metal part.

Wire welders, metal shears and brakes, planishing hammers, and shrinker/stretchers are readily available and affordable, and therefore, metal forming is no longer the exclusive art of professional craftsmen. In turn, simple to more complex fabrication and metal forming tasks are within the reach of adept enthusiasts, and this book comprehensively explains how to accomplish these fun and satisfying tasks. Enthusiasts are shown how to work steel, aluminum, and some other metals, and how to select a metal for a particular part fabrication. This book also discusses how to determine elastic limits as well as how to shrink and expand metal, heating and annealing, and may other metal working techniques.