Bending Metal Around Curve: Car Restoration Tips

"Hi, I'm Doug I work with 20 great guys in Saint Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods and we are going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. Now Alex is going to be cutting the edge of the piece that he has roughed in, in the last step. So the contour of the repair panel is correct to the outside of the car matches the body lines it is a good fit there. Now he is going to shape the edge of it and bend it around the finder edge. In a earlier step we used a little press to shrink the edges of a piece that we bent around the corner. But that makes for a pretty rough finish when you are done. This would give Alex more control over the over all shapes of the piece. The cut section and bend them around and then weld it all the way around the edge of the piece. You can see there are many cuts made where the cut is sharp and few cuts made where the bend is more gradual. This allows the sharpest corner to be made with the fewest cuts of steel. Obviously we want a few cuts as possible in order to maintain the structure of the car. Alex would now weld up the cuts that he has made to restore the structural integrity of the piece and fill everything up so it looks good."