How To Shrink Warped Sheet Metal

Heating up metal and throwing cold water on it may shrink it a tiny bit but it makes distortion and hard steel.

How to shrink warped sheet metal. Though weld shrinkage cannot be prevented it can be controlled by following these steps. Get an idea of how much heat it takes to cherry the metal and how hard you need to strike it to smooth it down. It not only makes a damaged panel repairable and can save a job from. When the weld shrinks along its length it causes base metal to twist around the weld figure 3.

Correctly sizing a weld not only minimizes distortion but also saves weld metal and time. The bigger the weld the greater the shrinkage. If you have access to a bead roller roll yourself a bead and shrink it. Lots of controversy surrounds heat shrinking yet i ve successfully used this process for 40 years.

Design and welding should be addressed to minimize this sort of warping. The condition known as an oil can is often encountered when performing automotive bodywork. It can be described much like an oil can lid. Why not just heat it and gently hammer the swell down.

Do not over heat the steel. Then twist the handle of the tool to twist the metal around one side of the fork. Then remove the tool and move it over so the fork will roll the metal over the other side of the fork by twisting the metal the other direction. This is where the tuck shrinking fork from a few weeks back comes into play.

Heat to blue only and shrink that much.