How To Make A Press Form - Embossing Sheet Metal Using Basic Tools!!

[Music] [Music] what's up everybody welcome back to make it custom today we are making a press form it's the same thing as embossing you may have heard of it before this is actually a subscriber that had commented asking about whether to bead roll or what is the best way to get a chevy logo into his firewall and i had mentioned that embossing or press forming is kind of the best way to do it rather than bead rolling because there are some pros and cons to both bead rolling if you were to do a chevy logo say like this one i just got this off the internet you would probably use a step die and you would press it up it would be a little bit difficult to get something pretty deep and to keep it really flat and that is what the beauty is of press forming it's a lot like hammer forming if you've seen our hammer forming video we're going to build a jig that holds the sheet metal totally flat and then i'm actually going to make a chevy symbol out of quarter inch thick steel i'm going to carve it up i'm even going to bevel the edges and we're going to hold you know the think about like a female side to the chevy symbol so like the cutout of a chevy symbol out of steel we're gonna weld it to this backer plate and then we're gonna press that straight through with our chevy logo out of quarter inch plate that's what press forming is jigging your sheet metal so that it can only stretch and it can only move where we want it to which is right where we're gonna emboss that logo so it's gonna be really cool you're gonna love this because after we take it out of the press form it's going to be dead flat it'll be as deep as we want it in this case it's going to be quarter inch deep i'm going to bevel the edges it's going to look really cool and it's repeatable we're going to clamp it all down we're not going to drill holes in it to hold on to it because with steel we can just add a bunch of clamps and actually press that right through so i'm going to get right into it i could use the cnc right now i could just go and make it for you but i realize most people don't have that at home so i just want to show you that it's pretty easy all i'm going to use is a grinder and a welder i'm going to make this form and if you don't have a press i'm sure you know somebody with one or you can bring a coffee to somebody with a shop and and they'll let you use one because all it is is just one press boom in a hydraulic press and you'll get the piece that you want it's gonna be really cool you guys if you haven't already liked or subscribed please do so hit notifications and we'll just insert a quick little video of my wife doing a burnout on her mini bike and now we're gonna get into this here's a tip don't try and think that you can draw a chevy logo perfectly because i've done it and there's no way to get it perfect they all look like crap unless you actually use one okay there's my chevrolet symbol trace it onto a piece of quarter inch steel plate and do my best to make this thing perfect or at least 100 good enough time to make some noise didn't plug it in stuff don't work unless it's plugged in it's the one thing i can never get right [Music] okay there's our rough cut of our chevy logo now i'm going to take a file to it and just get our edges and our corners finished you can see right in there when you're using a circular wheel it doesn't quite get into the corner super nice this is all very important we want this to be as nice of a shape as we can like i said i'm going to bevel these edges so that we get that embossed look you know like most chevy logos they kind of have that taper along the border i want that to happen when we press it so as nice as you make this is how nice your embossment's going to come out and i want to add a little something to that it's not just for stuff like this i've used press forming for all kinds of different things when you're repairing sheet metal on a car we recently used this on an el camino a 59 el camino that we did it had a spec like special beads that were stamped into the metal when you've got a bead roller you can only do so much you get different bead dies you get different you know wheels for the bead roller they can only do so much so if you have a deep bead that say is an upside down kind of trapezoid shape and it tapers off to something smooth on the end you can just make yourself a die that mimics that bead that fits right in there and then you can press that out using the same technique and that's what we do all the time if we have anything special that needs a certain shape for repair i like to use a press form because they're relatively simple to make and they're repeatable so if we get that same car in that has that same rust which most cars rust in the same places we've got that form all ready to go and we can just press one out it's a perfect flat piece there's no distortion from any metal work that's been done with a bead roller or whatever so this is a really versatile tool it's not just for doing something decorative like this this is just a great example to show you how to make a press form so i'm going to go ahead and clean this up with the file and i could cheat i could use my die filer but not everybody's got that one either so let's get a regular file and clean this up [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] okay just gonna clean it up a little bit of all sand it looks pretty good so there's our cut out now i'm going to bevel these edges a little bit like i said i want to get that kind of chevrolet emblem look not just a straight piece like that you can use a grinder you can continue to use a file i'm just going to use a three inch angle die grinder the other thing i want to do like i said was do my little bevels here and in order for me to grab it kind of raised up in here i'm going to add a piece to the back side when you're press forming as well especially if you want to use a little bit thicker material you might find that depending on the size of your press piece you might need to strengthen it up a little bit because we're using a hydraulic press we're adding a lot of force it's not like um this is a small surface area there's going to be a lot of force on this so i found this piece of scrap it's just three quarter by three quarter square solid bar so i'm going to actually run it across the back side here and put a couple welds on it that's not only going to strengthen this up and spread the load of our pressure from the hydraulic press but it's also going to give me something to clamp onto when i'm trying to do my nice little uh bevels all the way around so i'm going to cut a piece a little little piece of this weld it onto the back side and then we'll clamp it in here make it look pretty that should be good i might even add a little piece of material there and there to spread the load i really don't want anything bending and when i do my diagonal tapers on everything there's a chance that it could bend there maybe my weld will actually strengthen it up enough i'm just going to put weld on it i don't know it's not an exact science you got to kind of predict whether or not it's going to be strong enough i think this is going to be just fine though go grab the welder give this couple attacks here yeah we stayed pretty flat i think we did okay here so now i can hold it in here we can start grinding away our tapers [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay come have a look this is pretty crude we're almost kind of taking the shape of what i was talking about with the diagonals there i think it's starting to look like a chevy logo this is 36 grit i've got on here just to try and rough it out a little bit more aggressive i'm going to bump up to the 80 grit try and get as close as i can and then i'm going to probably finish it with a file and try and really sharpen up the corner edges and we'll go from there something i've been thinking about which we will see if it works for sure is these extra little corners in here i'm not sure how that's going to turn out if they're going to be nice and sharp or not i'm a little bit concerned about them because i've never done anything quite like this embossment but we're going to find out i'm pretty happy with how the chevy logo looks so if nothing else i mean probably weld that onto something next step is to cut out a piece that is the negative to this so i'm just going to cut that same template out in a piece of plate so right here this is going to be my piece i'm going to actually just use some flat bar and put the flat bar pieces in all the corners and all the edges that matter all the way around making that shape and then we're going to do the same thing for our clamp it'll make more sense as i'm doing it exactly what i mean by that but i'm going to use this two inch by quarter inch flat bar i'm going to put it you know all the way around in the corners i'm going to leave a small gap for our sheet metal and that is what we are going to press the sheet metal into is the the silhouette of this chevy symbol let's try that out so that's piece number one of all the pieces i'm gonna do the same thing all the way around i'm just gonna kind of tetris a bunch of little pieces to create the silhouette of this chevy symbol that i can press into and we're gonna go to time lapse because it'll take a few minutes and you guys are going to get bored if you skip through the whole video and you're just getting here now i'm going to kind of run over what we just did made this little piece this is our press die the chevy symbol we've got our female to that press that is the outline that this fits right into leaving a little bit of a gap around it for the thickness of the sheet metal then this will be our clamp plate this locks in like that and it's gonna pinch our sheet let's stick a piece of sheet metal in there we'll pinch it down with a bunch of clamps all the way around and then we put our die in there and we press it down and that should get us our shape now i'm not gonna lie i already tried this because i was worried at the depth at which this thing is this thing's pretty deep it's a quarter inch deep and i didn't bevel it all the way to the edges so i just wanted to see how it would handle it and it did okay it made this piece there are a couple of issues with this piece because the edge is flat here it actually pushed so deep it sheared this off like if it was even tighter you could pop these out they'd be keychains or something that was something i was worried about so what i'm doing to solve that is to adjust the depth of this so that we do not press all the way until we get to our flat spots i made some sheet metal fillers for the depth this is trial and error guys if it's something you've never done before it's okay to do trial and error same thing here and like i said i was a little bit concerned that there would be a little bit of rounding of those edges in these corners it did happen a little bit here and i don't hate it i think that it actually looks really good there's a little bit of rounding there but since i'm trying i'm going to try things out i'm going to press a few different ones and i'm going to also try to just stick the die back in and then maybe just use a chisel and knock that crease into those corners we'll see if it works we'll see if it doesn't work we're just figuring it out we're gonna go ahead and clamp this all up and go for a press so let's stick one on there clean side down next up is this make sure i'm the right way stick that on there and then i'm gonna clamp clamps are very important you want as many as you can get because you never know you don't want anything to move you want it to stay nice and flat you want to make sure that nothing moves and it stretches only in the area that you're embossing so i'm going to put six clamps on it it worked last time it'll work again we'll go press one out and see what we come up with with that shallower depth i've got two pieces of sheet metal in there adjusting our depth i might only need one so we're gonna just go give it a shot follow me to the press as long as i don't lose that i'm just going to center my top die a little bit here make sure that it's relatively centered looking looks pretty good just gonna move the whole thing over a little so press right in the center stick my little block in there okay fingers crossed everybody that's 25 tons of pressure pretty sure that's as far as it goes or as far as we need to go this is a 45 ton press let's have a look at what we got and then we'll try another one if we don't like it okay let's go back cool it's pretty nice hey i'd be happy with that that'd look good on a firewall get out nice and flat it stays when when you do that if you were to bead roll this you certainly wouldn't get that depth with a bead roll it would be very difficult to make that happen like i said i have two pieces in here adjusting the depth stop two of these pieces i'm gonna take one out and see if we can't get it a little sharper on the corners although it does look really good these corners didn't quite go all the way down so let's let's give it another shot i'm super happy with that though i think that looks wicked okay i have a feeling that this is the ticket this will be the one that we want i can already tell it's sucked into there a little bit it's wonderful nice and deep oh started cutting the edge a little bit so what someone could do next i think that you could fine tune these you sort of get the idea the difference between this and this is one thickness of sheet metal a sixteenth of an inch deeper is this one looking at them now i think that actually this would be the one that i like better because this one started cutting it a little bit if you were to round the edges of this you'd probably be able to go a little bit deeper like this one without having a cut happen i think this really illustrates my point with embossing and how to make a quick easy press form like i'm not trying to win the fabrication award with this thing like it's a lot of scrap steel and you know just zip cuts and whatever if you're going to spend time you spend time on your die because that's what is actually making the shape you want to make sure your outer profile of your female here that is good but you know i just tacked these pieces of plate together it's scrapped so you don't need anything super special to be able to do something like this and you know this is a cool piece like if that's on your firewall people are wondering how that's made is that just bondo like what are you doing timothy if you're watching i will send this to you free of charge if you want to use this on your car it's about that size you can kind of get the size with my hand if you want to use that on your car drop me a line i will send this to you in the mail one thing i did want to try is getting these a little bit sharper i'm not going to do it on timothy's yet because i want to make sure it works i would be totally happy with that i don't think they really need to be sharper but let's just give it a shot because we're here going to clamp this we'll pop this back on and then i want to get a clamp to hold that down let's see i can do here just like that maybe i'll put something on there so i don't damage the metal thinking if i use a little bit of a chisel right in that corner i could probably get a little bit more definition in that area we were talking about look at that i mean you end up seeing the mark though i'm not sure if it's worth it let's try it again i'm just gonna hold it because i don't think that i need that clamp so i did get a little bit more definition in the corners whether or not that's totally necessary if it were me and if i were you timothy i would hit me up for that piece right there and i'd weld that in your firewall or give it a try at home yourself that'd be even cooler really i'd enjoy that more hopefully you guys learned something about making press forms and embossing sheet metal it's a really cool thing that you can do not only to do this type of thing but to make weird shapes when you're trying to do rust repair or anything that you don't have bead dyes for or anything like that you can make a hammer form or a press form to make those pieces thanks a lot for watching make a custom everybody i'd really appreciate it if you click the like button subscribe hit notifications if you haven't already christina and i are loving making videos for you guys and everybody have a great day we'll see you on the next one bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Make It Kustom

Views: 152,196

Rating: 4.9677687 out of 5

Keywords: Metal shaping, metal forming, metal fabrication, sheet metal fabrication, press forming, embossing metal, sheet metal stamp, bead rolling, hammer form, metalworking, fabrication techniques, metal shaping techniques, Chevy, Chevrolet, Chevy bow tie, metal shaping with basic tools, automotive restoration, welding, metal shaping tools, hot rods, metal fab, hydraulic press

Id: VUzxuV_yUXs

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021