How to make a Hammer form
Hi, it’s Wray from ProShaper workshop in Charlton Massachusetts, we’re back and we got a little different project. Today we got a pretty sexy little motorcycle gas tank, it’s uh very tear droppy, and the problem was this tank, the guy that owns the bike, likes the shape of it, and it’s got to fit the bike, but this was uh blow molded, it’s PVC or something I don’t know some kind of plastic and it was leaking from day. One had a really nice paint job on it and the gas leaked and caused all this paint problem. So he commissioned me to make one out of 18-gauge steel and it’s a pretty complicated tank to make. These are pretty extreme uh compound curves on both sides and I’ll show you.
We got a lot of that all done, but actually the most complicated
part of the whole tank is this interface. It has the tunnel for the tube,
that’s not too bad. We got that almost done, but these pieces here have to be exactly
like they’re configured. So everything will all weld together and the way I
plan to make the tank uh this tunnel is one piece. This is going to be another
piece and this is going to be another piece.
I probably will weld something in for this and there’s four
mounts: they use the little rubber one-inch mounts with 5 16 threads on them. I
believe there’s one here and one here and here and that’s all fixed on the
bike, so we can’t change anything and it has to be perfect so that it just pops
right on and then for some reason, there’s access to the tank here I don’t Even
know what that is, but this is the equalizer tube so that both sides can drain
out, and I believe that’s where the petcock is, so all that stuff has to be in
the right spot and to make this is super complicated. So I made flexible shape
patterns and I was going to make gauges but to get it to all line up and
everything says I need. I need a buck well to make a wooden buck of that it
would be just crazy. So I says I know what I’m going to do.
I’M going to mold one of my copy box and first step of making a
copy buck is to make a wire form. This is quarter inch wire hot roll wire. I
bent it up now. This type of wire form doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect.
All it has to do is sort of fit in the space there like that, and I want to
pick up all the surface information which is incredibly complicated, so the
what I’m going to do is after I’ve made this now.
This is uh all MIG welded and then a few of them. I tig welded
together. So it’s a really strong assembly and I am going to wax this. Then you
put this in the wire form and this is the exact same thing as uh. Reinforced
concrete, like the wire, is like the rebar in concrete.
It creates a real, great strength for the bondo I’m going to put
in here and I’m going to put a wax as a release agent and then I’ll be able to
mold this thing and pop. It out – and that will be the negative of this well
actually, the positive, that’s the negative and now I’ll be able to fit everything
on here and then I’ll be able to tack it up, and I probably will have to do
something similar to the sides in Order for that all to come together, that’s a
really complicated tank. So I can’t put any bondo in here yet because I have
these holes, so I’m going to take clay and then it has this little groove
system in here and I looked on the bike and there’s no there’s no reason for
that. So that might have been something they had for the manufacturer or
something I’m not sure why that’s there, so that could cause a problem of the
bondo sticking in there. So I’m going to take clay and I’m going to clay around
that.
I got to clay all these holes up clay, these holes up and I’m
going to get that done first and then we’ll come back and you’ll see how I
cleaned it all up. Then it’s going to be waxed, then we’ll mix up the bondo pop
it in and you’re going to see the end result, which would be pretty cool all
right. We got the clay and now we’re going to just fill these up, I’m going to
probably leave them a little domey, so you might ask where’d this idea come
from. I call this my copy buck idea. I developed this over 20 years ago.
More than that, probably uh, probably almost like almost 30
years ago, I made XK Jaguar parts for 120s, 140s and 150s, and I had a friend
that lent me all the pieces he had collected like 17 of these XK jaguars, and I
needed fenders and everything Else, well, he let he let me borrow all of them
and he had bought them all super cheap and dismantled them with the intent of restoring
them. I think, actually he only restored one out of about 17 of them. He sold
it off all the stuff off. Eventually – and I came to the crossroads – I got to
make some bucks, so I had made one buck out of wood in my entire life and after
I made that wooden buck, I said, there’s got to be a better way. It’s the
craziest system.
Not only is it the real pain to make it you really, they have
very bad usage that to be able to use them to make the panels on them. It’s
just a nightmare, so I read a magazine article or something about this guy that
was trained. I believe in England and he was a wire form guy and as soon as I
saw the wire form, I said, that’s a cool idea, so wire forms I really like. But
now I had this problem of trying to make re-offenders for a 120 rear fenders
for a 140 rear fenders for a 150 jag, and I said I’m going to be about four
years making just all these wire forms because you’d have to bend each wire
super. Precisely in order to ensure that you had a really accurate
representation of the shape – and you didn’t want to sell offender to somebody
ship it to California, and then the guy puts it on the car and it doesn’t fit
he’s going to be mad.
He’s going to get on the phone demand his money back and then
you got to ship it back. You know, so I didn’t want to get into that nightmare,
so I knew my parts had to be perfect, so otherwise it was going to be trouble.
So I came up with this idea of molding the parts so actually the first one I
molded was with regular standard polyester resin, auto body filler, which
everybody calls bondo, because the original uh manufacturer of polyester resin
was called bondo and actually it was a cool Little side story on that is the
original creator of bondo was a guy that lived one town over from the town I
grew up in and he had a actually a manufacturing facility in the town I grew up
in which was Shrewsbury Massachusetts and it was Called unican plastics and he
created bondo in the uh in world war ii. He came up with the idea of combining
polyester resin with talc. Talc is the softest mineral that it’s in that’s out
there and it makes this really wonderful, add subtract medium, that we call
bondo or auto body filler.
So I had a bunch of experience with auto body filler. So I knew
that if I molded with that, I might have some problems with the thermoreactive
aspect of it. So the first one I did, I molded it off of it inside of a jaguar
fender and when it hardened up it kind of twisted on me – and I goes well –
that’s not too good. So I said, hmm reinforced concrete. It’s got rebar inside.
I wonder if I could just make a quarter inch wire form that
doesn’t have to be super precise and put the wire form on the inside of the
fender or whatever I was making and then mix up the bondo and mix it all around
the wires. I said I think that’ll work so a couple hours later, I made the
first copy buck and I ended up making all of the jaguar, fenders and all kinds
of pots. I made these copy bucks and, if they fit the coffee buck was made off
the inside of a really good part. It had to be super accurate and if I made the
panels fit that I knew my panels were going to fit, I never had any returns.
People were always happy with my quality, so it turned out to be a pretty good
deal, and today I don’t make too many copy bucks, but here’s a situation where
other than kind of guess guessing there’s no way.
I can get accuracy on this. Unless I do something like that, so
that’s what I’m going to do so we’re filling these holes all up with clay. So
we don’t get bondo inside of this tank and we don’t get locked in on it. So I’m
making these little dome shapes here and then the next step is I’m going to wax
this whole thing and then we’re going to mix up a lot of the bondo now the bond
that we’re going to use. Originally, I used just straight polyester resin, but
this has the little super fine glass hairs.
They call it waterproof bondo. This is like twice as strong as
the other stuff, so I use that exclusively now for doing these and, if you’re,
making a buck that you’re going to make say any kind of pot over and over again
and you need a buck to make multiples. This is a really good system to do that.
So we’ll get all this clay in here, I’m just about done with the clay, and then
I’m going to set this in here like this, I’m going to, I got to get to go, get
a black magic marker. I think, unless I can see this one, I can see this – I
guess and where this is now, I’m going to take and mark this like this and
that’s where all the bondo is going to be.
So we don’t want this right on the surface, so we’re going to
set it off the surface just a little bit. So we’ll put a couple pieces of wood
under or something just elevate it about an eighth of an inch off the surface.
Then we’ll mix up a whole bunch of bondo and fill all these little spots where
the where the magic marker lines are where the wires are going to be, get it
all there and then we’ll just plop it in right like that and then we’ll build
It up a lot more. We could actually fill that whole tube if we wanted to, but
we don’t need to, but we could we could come in later and do that too. If we
wanted to so let me get the clay finished up and I’m gonna get all these lines
in and then I’m gonna wax it all right.
So we uh, we got all the lines in there. That’s where I’m gonna
put the blobs of bondo and right now we’re going to use the wax. This is a
paste wax. It’s a hard wax, we’ll put a couple coats of that on there and
that’ll ensure that we can pull that bondo out because it’ll act as that
release agent. Now I’ve done many, you know probably 50 or 100 of these things
through the years so and I’ve never had any problems with using this paste wax
as a release age – and I know they do make special release agents.
I never had to buy it, though so we’ll wax this all up, really
good, make sure we hit every surface we’ll. Do it two or three times and um
we’ll leave the wax on and we won’t even actually uh wipe the wax off or
anything. We’ll leave. Leave it nice thickly coated all right, we’re going to
open up the bondo and let’s make some bondo the resin’s all at the top here. So
I got ta.
It’s been hanging around a little bit, so I gotta mix it all up.
So we’ll get it all mixed up and we’ll be back all right. We got it all mixed
up the resin and the solids have joined. We got a nice creamy consistency. We
got that wonderful, bondo smell, I seem to be acclimated to it.
I’ve used a lot of bondo over the years, but now I feel that
bondo should never be used on cars. So if you bondo your panel work, that’s
like giving up, you should be able to get that panel work perfect, especially
if you’ve got an aluminum body. You can polish the whole thing. It just looks
perfect, so I’ve become used to the bondo smell, but you know if I opened up
one of these cans, even in my garage at home or in my basement, or something to
be about two minutes before my wife. Would be yelling?
What’s that smell, I think that’s universal women just hate the
smell of bondo. Let’s dig this out. We should have a putty knife. Maybe mark
can go, get a putty knife that should start us off now. You have to admit it’s
much more honest to make your car body out of a piece of metal than this stuff,
so you know, take the challenge on and learn the skills.
So we got about four minutes five minutes to get this where we
want. We want to make sure we don’t see any greener, we got it mixed up, really
good and let’s see if we can get this done so I want to just blob this in
wherever I got the it’s all right. If I miss it too, but I got a target there,
where it’s all magic marked. This is where you don’t want any phone calls. I
don’t have my phone with me, though, this typically when the phone calls the
cell phone always rings at the most inopportune time.
I put about four coats of wax on everything, so, if I did it
right, it should pop out, if I did it wrong, it won’t pop out that’ll, be
scary. I guess I guesstimated the uh the amount of bondo pretty good too. I
think I’ve done this before all right now I made these little wedges. I’M gonna
put that little wedge right there and the other one over here and then we’re gonna
plop this in here just like that. We’ll get a paper towel and we got ta mix up.
Another big giant batch of bondo and the object now is to kind
of like get all this bondo right around the wires. So another batch and will
lock all those wires right in after about a half hour or so exposure to bondo
fumes. You do get a headache or I do so. I don’t know if I’ll get one, because
we’re not too long with it, but quite possibly it could happen we’ll see.
Hopefully this is the last one batch we’ve got to make.
This is kicked already so now this will all marry together. We’ll
start at the back and work our way to the front. Um took the little wood wedges
out. We don’t need those anymore and see if we can get that out mark, maybe a
pair of pliers. Anybody out there, music lovers uh and you listen to Spotify,
my daughter’s a singer and one of her band projects is called.
The band is called love crumbs, so they just put a single out
and it’s on Spotify and just look up. Love crumbs on Spotify and the song is Cavalcades
and listen to my daughter. Go to Allison looks like we’re going to need a
couple more batches. I’M filling that tunnel up quite a bit. It has to be in
order to get it to pick up all that shape nicely and get it around all the
wires.
Hopefully we have enough filler here, that’s what we call a
big-ass batch of bondo. Hopefully I get it on this one’s green because I use
the blue hardener, so start typing saying I forgot to put the hardener in. I
have maybe done that once in my life, when I was 12 I just hope this thing
comes out. If it doesn’t come out, I’m in deep doo-doo. This is going to be
more exciting than Al Capone’s closet there that Geraldo Rivera was trying to
open up.
I think the headache is about to start a lot of fumes. All right
there’s a few spots left. I think I should put some more on so I’ll mix, one
more small batch all right. So here’s the last batch and blobber in their tank
weighs about three times as much. Now so hmm it’s running when your bondo runs.
That means you got enough all right. So I think that was what
two and a half to three and three and a half batches. I think that three and a
half batches, always clean your tools off every bit of it. We use it all,
that’s it now. We just got to sit back and wait a few minutes, probably about
10 minutes, we’ll let that harden up and then we’ll see whether the gods smile
at us or laugh at us all right.
We got this uh all kicked now. I think it’s hot. It’s probably
about 150 degrees or more and let’s cross our fingers and see if we can get
this to pop. I heard something that was good, hopefully didn’t hit any uh
negatives. We might lose a little bit on the edges here, but there might have
been a few spots.
We didn’t have the wax too fully. Oh, look at that. It’s moving.
Oh, it broke loose on one side so far there we go. Let’s see the moment there.
It is look at that baby perfect. We have a mold, that’s
reinforced with steel. That’s super accurate! Try to make that in a wood, buck
ha ha ha. So that was a success.
It even lifts the magic marker. Look at that the magic marker
lifts right off of the plastic tank. Now, how would you do that any other way?
So now I got a really accurate piece. I can fit my steel pieces to so that I
can get all the welding done and everything I’m gonna have to make a little
separate piece.
You could extrude that in there, but that’s a lot of work, so I
think I’ll just make a separate little piece for that and I got all my
locations. This is my mount points for the rubber bumpers. The mount point
right over here right there. I did miss, I didn’t get enough bondo in here. That’s
where the crossover piece is.
Oh boy. No! Is that the mount? No, that’s the mount, oh boy!
Well, I can put it back in and get that if I need it.
So I think, overall, that was a pretty good success and we used
about a full gallon of bondo, so remember to uh. Please subscribe we’re trying
to build a channel. Tell all your friends spread the channel on all your car
clubs and in forums and keep the comments coming you’re going to see some
pretty cool stuff at the pro shaper workshop. Thanks for watching its Wray Schelin
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