Hey guys, it's Rob here from Rides by Kam.
Today's custom car building tip is one way that we build custom panels.
In the last episode we showed you how we prototype the parting cardboard.
In today's episode we're going to show you how we transfer that into steel
So first step will be to transfer our cardboard template to our piece of steel
so we can get it ready to cut out. But when you're transferring to your steel
this is it, this is your final cut. You need to get everything perfect. So if you
have a little variation in in your template then you need to make sure it's
ruler straight in your steel before you cut it.
Our next step is to cut all these straight edges with the guillotine and then in this
particular sort of panel that we've got we can do that because these lines are
straight. So from there then we'll go over to the hand shears and we'll take
pretty much most of the edges off the corners. With this at the moment the
corners aren't perfectly rounded. So the next step for this will be to use the
belt sander to get our corners really nice and get all the round corners how
we want them. So there's obviously a lot of different ways that you can get these
corners round and some people might use a belt sander on it on a linishing bench
but I just find sometimes that they're a little bit too fast to set at one speed.
So we tend to use the belt sander by hand because you can control the
speed by the depth, like how far you pull the trigger in. You can actually use the
edges of the belt and get things quite straight. They do have a steel guard
underneath, a little steel runner under here, and I tend to use that a lot to
keep my edges on my steel quite straight.
We've chosen in this instance the Cubitron II 80+.
We find that it doesn't really damage the steel too much
but it gets the job done.
On this panel here we don't really have to do the edges.
These edges that you see here because we've done them already on the guillotine.
All we really have to concentrate on is these corners here and
you can see I've still got my texture line on there, so that's where we'll
use the belt sander basically to get these corners and the radius exactly how
we want and just take it down to our texture line.
So with our belt sanding complete
now we'll move on to the next step which will be putting it in the bead roller.
So to do that we just want to quickly orbit sand all the edges off
and deburr anything that could be sharp so that it doesn't stop us when we're
putting it through the bead roller which you'll see in a minute. We're going to
use the Cubitron II 80+. Once again, same sort of reason behind it, that it
actually doesn't really mark or damage the steel so doesn't really create
should work for us later on. And obviously yeah we'll be using the orbit
sander. The next step for us now is to put our swage line in, where you can see
that we've made our template up before. The reason we sort of want to do that
now before we do any holes or any or anything that we're going to fit it with
is because we don't want anything hanging through so when we slide
it around on the table we can move around freely without anything to stop
it because if this thing stops, then you're starting again with your piece of steel.
We have another episode that is solely on swage lines and bead rolling
and that'll explain to you why and how we do it, and where we do it, and what
process we go through to achieve all the different styles. So now that bead
rolling is complete we've just got to drill the outside holes which will
eventually hold our panel to the inside of the car where we're trying to put
this panel. The other two things that we have to do is our holes in the middle.
So to give us exact location of our dimple dies we've drilled our holes out
we've got our dimple die holes, our template holes in there, and the next
step is to use the pistol grip with an 80+ Cubitron II Roloc pad on it.
We choose this for the same sort of reason as we explained before. It doesn't
chunk into the steel and it doesn't wreck the next step for what you're
going to be doing next.
What we're going to do next is we're going to finish it off with the orbit.
We're going to use a Cubitron II 80+ disc and now there's a few reasons for
that. One is we we want to make this part look really cool when it's finished.
Two, we want to make sure we get any a little scuff marks out, any little scratches
from building the panel. And then three, it pretty much is your preparation for
your rust treatment and then your edge primer. So once we've done the the sanding
side of things, we'll actually put it together. We're going to put some
little bit to mesh inside the back here to dress up the holes a little bit.
We'll put the panel in the the boot of the Cuda and then we can stand back and have
a look at what we've created and see if it all turned out how we want it.
So in the custom car building world you're playing with steel and sharp stuff
sparks are flying everywhere everyday. I can't stress enough to my apprentices
and the young fellas that work here in the shop how important safety is and
whether it be from a pair of gloves to just basically stopping the noise that's
getting in your ears, but safety glasses, I mean these safety glasses are really
cool. We've all probably worn safety glasses before and debris gets down in
it'll always find a way in so these safety glasses in particular
have got some foam, they'll actually sit up against your face and they've got
little areas where they'll let air out there so that they don't fog up. So that's pretty
good because the last thing you want to do is put a pair of glasses on and fog
up and end up chopping your finger off because you can't see what you're
cutting. So the other thing is we obviously use these a fair bit too.
They're the disposables throw-away packet. With all the the grit and
grinding stuff that floats around the workshop it's a good idea to have these
because you can just throw them out and get another packet. These gloves we
use them on a number of different things in the shop, especially for handling bare steel.
We all know that when you're prepping steel and it's all
how you want it it's ready to go in the spray booth, the first thing we do is we
grab a pair of these each and we put them straight on, take the panels into
the spray booth so that there's no contact with our skin whatsoever. Because
later on that's going to come back to haunt you. So they've got rubber on this
side here so when we're sanding this actually grips to the sandpaper and it
does a couple of things. It helps you hold the
splines especially, which we'll show you later on, but most importantly it stops
your fingers getting ripped to pieces by the sand papers that you're using.
So this mask in particular, you can wear it throughout pretty much majority of
your tasks that you're doing through the shop and the day, whether it be a little
bit of welding fume, dust, low-level vapor
you can wear this for pretty much all of those.