An effective and inexpensive way to support the panel during metal work is to create a sandbag.
How to shape sheet metal bean bag.
Need the metal to shrink in one spot even though there isn t a wrinkle.
You want to put your metal over the dent and hammer it with the ball end of the ball peen hammer.
Just add dry sand to the panel beater bag and it ll support your sheet metal work piece while giving under the mallet blows to allow your metal piece to be formed into shape.
These metal panels are repaired by being beaten back into shape with a hammer or mallet.
Leather metal forming bag.
Lots of little hits will make your piece of metal take shape.
Move the metal around to get a smooth bowl shape.
Made at techshop chandler www techshop ws.
These bags can be filled with steel or lead shot as well as sand or other materials.
In this case the sheet of flat steel will be formed into a wheel disc.
Follow along as i demonstrate how you can begin shaping metal with hand tools only.
They are used to back up metal in a somewhat yielding manner.
How can you go about shaping metal with hand tools alone.
Just make sure you use hearing protection.
A variety of bowl diameters and depths facilitates more varied work another traditional method of hammerforming uses a leather bag filled with sand or lead shot planishing with a shop built pneumatic hammer.
Made out of leather and filled with fine sand the sandbag cradles the metal panel and allows it to be formed into a curved shape without damaging the surface.
The sheetmetal is slid between the two bars and twisted back and forth to create a fold.
Shot and sand bags are very useful for hammer forming three dimensional shapes.
This is a leather forming bag used for pounding out organic shapes in sheet metal.
I m new to all this but it s still possible for me to form flat sheet into some simple shapes using basic tools.
Today i show a bit of basic metal shaping.
You can shape metal exclusively with the stump by stretching over a hollow and shrinking the resulting folds or you can stretch into a nearby shot bag and cold shrink into the stump.
This takes patience and can be meditative.
As you hammer metal on a shot bag it dishes out.