An Afternoon Note

I was trying to figure out how to bend some of the metal for the renovation of my gutted Airstream trailer when a could of ideas came up. I have only limited fabrication tools and skills, but thin aluminum sheet can be relatively easy bent. The trick is often in getting it to do so relatively uniformly, or of getting the right leverage. My home-built metal bending brake isn't the right tool for some tasks, the hand-held bender that's intended for bending ductwork has too shallow a mouth, and pliers are not uniform enough to wider/longer bends. So I used Visio to do a crude drawing of a couple tools that might help address this. I'll see what happens when I have a chance to create them and use them.

Drawing of two metalworking tools