Hot Rod Restoration: Specialty Equipment for Restoring Hot Rods

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Joel Jones, I own Jonesy's Ink, we specialize in customizing and restoring classic cars and hot rods out of Richfield, Washington, and today I'm going to talk about some of the specialty equipment and basic tools that you're going to need for your own project. What I'm standing right next to is your basic milling machine. If you're going to be doing any kind of customizing or fabricating of any brackets for putting specific engines in cars or converting different transmissions or differentials, you're going to need to be able to drill holes, slot holes, and fabricate special parts. And the best way to do that is with a milling machine. It gives you dimensional tolerances and three different axes--x, y, and z--by utilizing all the different levers. In addition to that, it allows you to remove material, shave things down with end mills, put different surface finishes on different materials, and alter the thickness with very very precise accuracy. Less expensive substitute is obviously a drill press, and you can get pretty extensive drill presses with cross slides and different feeds to kind of Band-Aid your fabricating skills. The next specialized piece of equipment I'm going to talk about is the lathe. The mill is good for doing work on flat pieces of material--aluminum, steel, pretty much anything, you can even do plastic. The lathe on the other hand is used for turning round parts. Dialing in the outside diameter or the inside diameter of a bushing, cutting threads, drilling holes in the center of round objects that would be otherwise very very difficult to do on the mill. You can't really have a complete custom fabrication shop without these pieces of equipment. Otherwise you'll really really struggle to try to get the dimensional tolerances that you need and therefore your projects won't be as nice, things won't fit quite as well, and everything will be sloppy. Other essential piece of equipment is the hydraulic press. Basically, the press is used to apply direct force to bearing races, acetal bearings, anything that you need to force on that you shouldn't be using a hammer blow. Some of the things that you need to think about if you're going to go out and buy a press, they actually are fairly inexpensive. This one is a pneumatic press, which means that it uses air pressure to actuate, but a lot of them you can go out and get are manual, they just have a little bottle jack that you apply, you just pump yourself. You need to take some time and try to accumulate some of the special tools to go along with the press. The most common is what's called a bearing splitter, and these come in all different sizes and they're an absolute must if you're trying to remove bearings from different shafts. In addition to that you need different types of material, like I've got a bunch of brass cylinders here that you can put underneath of the press to apply a force directly onto a bearing or a shaft or anything else. Also, aluminum blocks. Anything that takes up space, because inevitably when you're pressing on something, your geometry isn't going to be accurate, and you need spacers to take up the slop. In addition to that, you also need an assortment of old bearing races that you can put over things to press down on. And I always keep, any time I get a strange size of bearing that I replace that wears out, I always keep the races and throw them in here on the press so that if I ever run into something that needs a special size to push on, then I've got it. The next piece of equipment I'm going to talk about is an absolute shop must, whether it's in your garage or you have an external workshop, every single shop has to have some type of compressed air system. This one is a pretty big compressor, it's a seven and a half horsepower motor on it, and it puts out about 180 PSI. Every single shop, whether it's any size, has to be able to blow tools are, blow parts off, and run air tools, whether it's a sandblaster, an impact gun, or any of the other small tools. This air compressor is absolutely indispensable, and you should not try to tackle any kind of a restoration job without some kind of compressed air. A piece of shop equipment that I would also consider a necessity is the TIG welder. T-I-G stands for Tungsten Inert Gas, and this by far is the most versatile welder that I've got. It'll weld aluminum, stainless steel, mild steel, any kind of material that you really want. It takes a lot of skill in order to be able to do this effectively, but it's versatility is worth any investment that you're going to make in it. Obviously, expense of the piece is may exceed what your average hobbyist will want to do, but if you're going to be extensively working with stainless, or aluminum, then you must have a TIG welder in your shop. The next piece of equipment I'm going to talk about is a plasma cutter. Now a plasma cutter is kind of... I would classify as a specialized piece of equipment because it's not absolutely necessary, but boy it sure really speeds up the process when you have to cut any kind of metal. Basically, the plasma cutter you hook up to the compressed air system and you plug it into the wall and then you can cut through any kind of thickness of material you want. Whether it's rusty metal you're cutting out of your floor pans, or if you need to cut a piece of sheet metal to make a new patch panel for your project, a plasma cutter will do that very very well. Plasma cutter can also sometimes substitute other tools, like a shear. If you use a guide and you run the torch right along the guide, you can cut sheet metal very very quickly with almost no warpage at all, and have it be almost as good an edge as a sheared piece of sheet metal. Most of the time plasma we use it to cut off rusty bolts, shear sheet metal with it, and cut out rusty sheet metal because of the speed that it has."