OK, time to bring out the sheet metal tools and get my learning panel in place.
I have a Harbor Freight (HF) bead roller. If you know about bead rollers, you've learned about the HF product deficiencies. It's a kit. However, I did get it to do useful work out of it unaltered, and that was today's plan. It works in a bench vise. Here it is:
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In order to use it, I need to substitute for the supplied handle as it won't clear my work bench, so I applied the usual substitute when you need something quick and simple:
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I'm using a technique from Lazzie, which has you pre-stretch the metal to be bead rolled buy running through an English wheel. You can see the highlights in the metal now in the bead roller (below) where I stretched it. Doing this prevents the bead roller from turning your panel into a potato chip kind of of piece. I can say that it does work even when the English wheel operator (me) isn't too experienced.
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I'm about a mile from the ocean. I have to primer everything or it rusts. The white paint is metal primer. All this would work better on bare metal, but that's a luxury to me, so I went with keeping the primer on while doing these operations.
It came out pretty flat, but I ran the backside flanges through the English wheel to get them a little straigter still. It worked pretty well. I'm like a 1-armed paper hanger trying to do this stuff all by myself. My beads are a little crooked, but what can I say? They're in there and fully functional. I'll get better as I go.
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So, I wire brushed the weld spots clean and clamped the stuffing out of the panel, so it wouldn't move as I welded (don't you love the smell of burning wood in the afternoon?) and "got 'er done."
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And, now we have panel #1, my test piece, in place and ready for final grinding and paint.
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All-in-all, a solid C+ for the day. Mo better next time.
Cheers,