hi, anyone got any good tips on how to bend my ally side panels nicely without a brake press?

lots of g clamps and straight bits of timber.

It helps if you can heavily score the panel on the back side of it too.

be carefull .........there is a fine line between heavily scoring it and scoring it TOO heavily.

Score it too much and it will snap when you bend it over.

Do NOT score the aluminium. It will crack along the line. Clamp the aluminium to the chassis tube using a wooden batten close to the line of the fold. You can easily dress the aluminium around the square tube using a hammer and a piece of wood. Try to bend evenly along the whole length and bend a little bit at a time rather than trying to do the whole 90 degrees in one hit. Take your time and you will find it quite easy and very satisfying.

Mine never cracked.

Like i said it depends on how deeply you score it.

I think you will find a more polite apporach to your reply would have been to say

'in my opinion / experience if it has been scored it has tended to crack so you may want to bear that in mind'

The right way to do it is with a brake press, the wrong way to do it is to dress it oven in one hit with a metal faced hammer. There are a multitude of ways inbetween, none of them being right or wrong, just different.

Rubber builders mallet. Just my way of doing it on my Striker

two lengths of 1" box clamped tightly against the line you want to bend, then push over by hand and slap with a bit of wood, rubber mallet dead shot plastic hammer. Work your way up and down the length so bend over in stages.

Do not hit with anything metal or it will muck it up.

If the chassis is built clamp and bend in situ.

For the bonnet hand roll over a bit of old plastic drain pipe.

Regards Mark

can i ask...can any heat be used?

The old school way is to use a block of soap, rub it well along where you are going to fold it, apply heat when the soap goes brown, the ally will just fold over without fuss.

Regards

John

[Edited on 21/10/08 by 3GEComponents]