How to Make Your Own Panel Templates
Michael ComanDescription
Cardboard is far more malleable and easy to cut than steel. An accurate cardboard template is incredibly important in creating a repair patch, and Michael shows you how.
For more tips and tricks, check out our course Simple Body Repairs.
So from this, we now can decide what we need to repair. There's a repair to be done here. That's quite a simple repair. So you can measure that with something like these dividers Mark it on a piece of steel and then cut a piece of steel. So that'll go there. You see it's a bit oversized, but we'll chop that down when we decide where we're going to do our cut lines. What that will give us the piece there. The next bit is a lot more complicated. This top here is nice and solid. There's nothing wrong with it. So we'll try and keep that because it's got some factory lines in it that you don't want to lose. So we're going to come behind there now to get this information, we can make a template. You can use cardboard, use an old conflict pocket. If you wish we've just got some white card. You can put that on and start pushing with your fingers into the lines that you need. You can take some of the excess off and just use scissors or your snips for your steel work as well. We get the information on there. And then once you've done that you should end up with quite an accurate template like that of what you're going to repair and replace. Now, the more information you get on this, the better because the more information it makes your repair better. So we've got plenty of material there but what we are missing is this big pressing here where the bolts go for the bonnet stay. So we can take those out. I haven't done them with a spanner before. Oh, come, we've got a little piece of steel there that it needs to come off. See how rotten it all is. So what we can now do is get some more information about this section here. So again, we make templates that gives us the shape of the pressing. This will have been done at factor with a big press lots of shrinking and stretching of metal going on there. That's going to be quite difficult to replicate but we'll get there. So that gives us the shape that we need. And we also need to take the profile of the dip. So that profile gives us what we need there. So from these templates I've got all the information I need to go away and make that part repair.
Great and instructive video! I would have liked to have seen the actual creation of the fabricated panel. I have a number of these types of repair panels to do on my restoration but, I would have liked to have seen the method(s) by which you create that almost complex panel - the concave part, particularly. At the moment, I'm not sure what to do for the best?
Does this video not finish too early? Anybody can cut pieces of cardboard out but tranferring that information in to a repair piece is another matter. IS there a separate video for that?