Cody Walls drove down from Delaware today so we could punch louvers in the hood sides for 35 Chevy he's been working on, for anyone that missed the build thread, see some of his beautiful work here... http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/cody-walls-builds-a-35-chevy.976318/ After using the samples we punched last month, Cody wanted to run one more test sample with larger louvers to check the flow against where the headlight lines up. Here Cody and Kyle wheel a new test sample... Using the Lennox to punch the louvers, stops were riveted in place. Clamped to the hood side, we decided on a slightly larger, with more to be added at the rear than the front.. The Driver's hood side takes it's turn... One down..... Passenger side.... All finished up... Can't wait to see these on the car..
Thanks for the comments everyone. Want to also thank Dave (D-Russ) for giving us the referral at Jalopyrama (we couldn't make it this year) and especially to Cody and Dave Thomas (the car owner) for bringing us the challenge. Great to work with Cody if even just for a day, you get a good feel for his eye for detail......if you didn't get it from looking at his build thread.
I somehow missed his thread till i seen your link. So thanks for that. I love that kind of inspiration.
I had a request to show more details of the louver punching process, so I'll just post it here for others to see as well. My Lennox Tru-edge had a dovetail fixture that the rear fence travels on, where it can be moved forward and backward, and clamp to set the backstop distance. Shown here, we also have a 1 x 1 x 1/8 steel angle bolted in to extend the fence length, then some bent stops clamped in with vise grips. This allows us to set the width distance of our louver. The duck bills were clamped on to have a handle for better control. Even though the fence helps out, the panel does have a tendency to bounce/oscillate a bit, which may affect the accuracy of the louvers if it can't be controlled. For the forming process, the initial cut is done just enough to slit the panel. If the punch presses through too far on the initial cut, it will stretch too much and you'll end up with a wavy louver, with little chance of success in removing the distortion. It's here that test panels are beneficial, to see what depth setting brings in that distortion, then back up a bit on the adjustment and use this for the initial. Then additional passes are made, incrementally increasing the depth with each pass, until you get to a depth you're happy with. The tooling was purchased from Neil Dunder, www.gogitzit.com and the design works well in punch varying length louvers. If you're looking for a specific size with all the same size, a fixed die punch will be quicker. For the option of varying the length, this die is the cat's meow. The straight through feature allows you to make the louver however long you'd like, then on the VERY LAST pass, the handle is rotated to the side to "coin" the ends. Here's some panels that we did with using the manual fence and the clamped stops. Recently I was contacted by David Thomas and Cody Walls about punching louvers on the hood sides of the 35 Chevy that Cody is building for David. Now I'd never had much issue with using the fence as a backstop before, but I'd seen Cody's work thus far on the 35, and didn't feel we needed to take a chance. I had some material clamps in the shop from a duplicator that went to another machine, and started surfing CL for a used linear slide. This would allow us to still use the dovetail to set the backstop distance, but the work would be clamped in place for better accuracy (less chance of a screw-up) for the side to side travel. Also, I hoped that the clamps would help to limit some of the chattering/oscillation that this process would tend to inflict on the panel as you formed the louvers (which it did). I struck gold with a pair of 48" linear slides for $50. To attach to the dovetail fixture, the fence was removed, and I used this "U" channel, attached to the dovetail fixture with some countersunk 1/4-20's. ......followed by a piece of flat bar that fit fairly snugly inside the bottom of the U channel.... ......which was then drilled to match the linear slide's hole pattern.. I also used some 1/4-20 bolts and riv-nuts as end stops, as it saves on the sudden uptakes when you run out of rail. (yeah, I did that....) The material clamps are bolted via an interface plate, which also allows us to put the clamp above or below for some adjustability to the tooling height in the machine. For flat panels it worked out hanging below the plate, for stepped flange panels like Cody had on the hood sides, we had to move the clamp on top as shown. To set the louver widths (varying lengths) we used 1 x 1 bent angle out of 18ga sheet metal, and used the shrinker to add a radius to the lower line. It always pays to do a test panel, here clamped in place, before punching the real thing that someone has countless hours into it fitment perfection.. Then jump on the good stuff.. Finished panels... As fitted to the car.... As stated in earlier post, Cody is the one who did all this beautiful metalwork on the 35, the only thing we did was to put a bunch of holes in his work.... Also, to those who don't follow Cody on IG, it looks like the 35 will be headed to GNRS in about a month. Very fitting for all of Cody's hard work and eye for detail.
HA! That's funny....34 ford style hood louvers on a 35 chevy and my car has 34-35 chevy hood louvers on a 34 ford. VERY nice, BTW....
Well soon after the 35 Chevy returned from GNRS, Cody had it blown apart again to tackle more items on the to-do list.. One of them being inner fenders, which he had asked if we would punch some louvers in those as well. He hand fabricated these parts, seen here: He had quite a bit of work in these and had suggested shipping them down, but we aren't that far apart so I suggested meeting in the middle to pass off the parts rather than trust them to shipping. So we guessed on Parole, MD as being close to a good midpoint, and picked the Double TT Diner to grab some breakfast and catch up on his trip to Pomona. Kyle and I arrived and had made about one lap through the parking lot when Cody pulled in, so this worked to be a good halfway point between Southern MD and Milford DE. Here's what we picked up.... This has a tighter radius than what we had done for the hood sides, so for the punch to better follow the contour, or sit perpendicular to the point of punch, we plan on a rotational fixture attached to the linear slide that the "trough" of the inner fender can be rolled from side to side.. and just in time, the Mini Cooper wheel bearing/hub assembly had come in yesterday (looks like this) ....so the first order of business was to void the warranty. Made a trip over to David's shop to make sure the press was still operational, and pressed the hub out of the bearing. We need a flat surface for the new material clamps, so Kyle worked on the lathe to get rid of the excess metal here: He got this far tonight... These are the new clamps we'll be using, the single 8mm bolt will connect it to the flange Kyle it working on.. Meanwhile, I cut out the plate to hold the bearing... The top will be folded 90* and that flange bolted to the top of the glide blocks here... Once complete this should allow us to rotate the inner fenders as we punch the louvers.
With the wheel hub faced, the flange is trimmed... The attachment bracket.... Pressed back together... "test run" videos: Material clamps should be here tomorrow, so we'll try and get some louvers punched next week.
Thanks! Worked on some louvers tonight, wanted to get some practice pieces done to see how well our "theory" might fare. Kyle cutting an inside lip off the clamp before cutting it in half.. Meanwhile I got the holes (and some spares for height adjustment) drilled in the wheel hub flange... Clamps added... We used a "squaring plate" to align the panel for louver angle.. The punch needed some relieving to insure the corners didn't hit the inside radius of the panel... Cleaned up the grinder marks with a Scotchbrite pad.. Looking at the louvers... Action shots: We have some more relieving to do on the tooling to eliminate some marking, then we'll do one more practice piece before breaking into the good stuff..
Here's the next practice panel as compared to Cody's inner fender panel.. Punching the louvers in the practice panel.. Here's the moment of truth, the inner fender ready for punching... Looks like our crown still exists! another view.... One down, one to go..
Robert. Bad A$$. You are ridiculous. Dunno' what else to say. Stay busy. Forever. Man .... that's craftsmanship. All day, every day. King !!!
So just to add some clarification, your initial pass is only to slit the metal, but push through too far, and given all the surrounding metal holding things, you'll get too much stretch. This results in a wavy louver that just ruined all of someone's hard work. Go through too little, and it will tend to flatten out the panel. The subsequent passes really only add more depth to the louver. Any stretch from the first pass is just about there for good. With the rolled/radiused panel, we're trying to push through for more stretch to maintain all that crown that Cody put into these panels, so the initial pass was much deeper. On a flat panel at this depth setting, it would have wound up looking like the Atlantic Ocean. On this one, it helped to maintain the panel crown.
Finished the driver's side inner fender this morning.. Now to get them back to Cody so he can do some more re-assembly..
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