Technical Bead Rolling & 10 Miles of Bad Road

So just got the ol bead roller up and running, very humbling! I ended up with the 4 beads I wanted and gained 10 miles of bad road to some how smooth out. Simple question, how do you avoid the warp age? Didn't take pic's directly after rolling the beads, to much in shock, so the pic's don't really show how bad it is. Now do I have to learn how to shrink & stretch? Thanks!

 

pics of your die set up would be good.

 

Pre stretch the areas to be beaded. Anvil and hammer.

 

Eastwood or someone like them did a short video on bead rolling and they pre stretched the panel by running it through an english wheel to put a small crown on it before running the beads. They were doing floor pans for an A coupe they were working on. A search in google should turn it up.

 

Cheap manual Woodward Fab that I adapted an Electric motor w/ reverser. Wouldn't do 18 gage like advertised so I beefed it up sum, helped a lot. Have Anvil and hammer, which end of the hammer do I use, smileyface!
Gordon, I will look for the video as I have the drivers side floor still to do...................................

 

Love your little R.R. track anvil, Brigrat! Did you make that?
What's the weight/yr. spec on the big one?
My bud Bonneville Butch gave me a 160 lb. English anvil, an 1860 Peter Wright from England.
Nice retro-act on the Woodward fab...just watch those thumbs!
Where can I get some info on that electric motor retro?

 

Mike;
http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/manual-to-power-bead-roller-conversion-kits.1050978/
Yep, R&R Anvil! Looking for some horse shoe nails to mount it to the chunk of wood. I use it mainly to build knives & such, just thought it looked the part next to it's big brother! It is a Peter Wright of unknown to me poundage, has a number 15 on it.
and PM sent!

 

Is the warp at the end of the beads or along the sides of the beads or both?

 

Seams to be at the ends but after a few beads the metal starts walking all over. Not the first time I was told to hammer or planish (sp.) the metal first, just didn't want to by another tool ( English Wheel). Why can't I buy or build a die that simulates the English Wheel to use on the bead roller before dimpling?
On this side of floor I even crept up to the bead gradually, starting with a light pass, the next deeper and so on do avoid the war page. No luck!

 

I just got a bead roller in the fall, I don't have an English wheel.
I have played with it a little, before I roll any beads, I crown the panel a little by hammering it in a grid pattern in the area where I am going to bead it with a low crown hammer on the top of my fab table. I lay out a pattern of 1" squares, and alternate passes hammering in the middle of the squares with passes where the lines cross. I learned this off Mindovers metalshaping dvd. It seems to help minimize the distortion when I roll the beads, but I have only played with it on scraps so far, haven't made any panels for anything.

 

do you have a stretcher? Its a little hard to tell just looking at the photo, but I bet you could save that panel by stretching the edge, adjacent to the ends of the beads to the beads. If you dont have a stretcher, you could do the same thing with a variation on the method I described above, try hammering a grid pattern along the edge adjacent to the beads, with a low crown hammer and your anvil as a dolly.
Also, it looks like you have tacked the panel down along the rocker? You cant fix the distortion with the panel welded down, cut the welds and get it to fit properly BEFORE you try to weld it down, that's just going to fight your efforts to get the distortion out.

 

I build floors out of 18 ga Elecro-Galvanized, it doesn't distort like cold-rolled, and forms nice. It has a certain amount of rust protection, and takes paint real well. The downside is, you should use a respirator, and have plenty of ventilation when welding and grinding on it.

 

As has been mentioned, you need to pre stretch the line that will be your bead. Raise that area if you're bead is going to be sunk in the panel. In other words, raise the area slightly in the opposite direction of the recess. You can also help fix the distortion of the area at the ends of the beads by "finishing off" the beads with a home made tool. A hole punch of the same size as the bead with half of the cutting edge ground down works well. I hope this makes sense. Lazze has some videos on YouTube I think showing how to pre stretch. He uses a wheel, but you can do it with a hammer and anvil if you are careful.

 

15 is the British stone weight. 15 stone is 210 pounds. Peter Wright anvils are weighed in stone.


Sent from my iPhone using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

The sheet measures 10 units - in the flat.
The linear surface up and down along the beads measures 10 units - but in the flat it measures 8 units. It's gonna ripple because the sheet is gathered in the beads.

__________ (10)
_/\_/\_ (10)
__________ (10)

Pre stretch or run the beads out to the ends.

Grab the old lady's pleated curtains in the middle, leave the pleats at the rod and pull the pleats out in the middle. You'll get the idea

 

To my knowledge there is no way to neatly form or "coin" bead ends with a roller.
Make a tool like this one with appropriately shaped dies to do it. Hammer or press the dies together.
It also seems to me that properly shaped roller dies should first form the bead and secondly, at full penetration, "set down" the material around the bead to the previously flat condition leaving zero distortion.
The ends of the bead are then "coined" also leaving zero distortion.
The operation is similar to punching louvers. Stretch leaving zero distortion.

 

I use the appropriate sized open end wrench .with bead upside down and on an anvll . a round punch to finish the ends from the backside

 

So Vicky are you saying that to save the current panel, he needs to shrink the outer edges, not stretch them? Readily admit, I am still a definate newby at this, I am still learning here.

 

If you don't have an english wheel you can use a planishing hammer just as well to prestretch the metal. Even a cheapo HF one will do the trick. I have one here at the shop, it's how I do it. Lot cheaper then a wheel and a heck of a lot easier then a hammer and anvil. If you plan on using your bead roller a lot it would be worthwhile.

 

metalman, A manual planishing hammer or a pneumatic?

 

One of the things I think I noticed was that the Eastwood video had the guy putting a flange around the perimeter of the panel when he was finished. I bet that helped pull it back to a more flat position. I noticed in your pics your edges are still raw without flanges. You could probably use your bead roller to make a flange on the panel when it is completed but you would need to adjust the size accordingly before starting.

 

I suggest running some test beads. As pictured, I believe your dies will produce warp free beads without pre stretching
Your last pass must be with dies at full engagement in order for them to form and finish the panel warp free.
The bead ends will be warped until you coin them in a separate operation .
In all the beading I've done with a Pullmax I've never pre stretched. My shop made dies form and finish the panel.
There is no reason your roller dies used at full engagement won't do the same.

 

Short answer yes
And it's going to be difficult to get it 1/2 way correct before it gets worse and thrown in the scrap heap. Bends on the edges will help a bunch. Bigger bends more help & 18 ga offset won't do much.

Check the pic.
Can you see the waffling edges here? It was on all 4 sides after the beads.
This piece was 33-1/2" X 43-1/2" square and straight before I started beads.
After the beads were in, it still measured 43-1/2 on the edges where no beads are (at the clamp to floor) but was about 43 - 5/16 heavy down the center ( between the clamps to the floor) thru the beads and the 33-1/2 stayed the same. The 2 sides were no longer straight. All 4 sides had a pretty substantial bend yet to come so I wasn't worried.



Look at a dome shape or a bowl- put it so the bump goes up, and then flip it so the bump goes down. Clearly there's an up and a down right.
You know that how a dome is formed In a flat panel the center is stretched and it rises up - or the edges are shrunk and that will pucker up a rise in the center? Ok what happens when the center of a flat panel is shrunk vs stretched? I don't know how to put that in words because it doesn't have an up or a down like stretching the center creates a dome & it's not really the opposite of a dome because that would be either up or down, it's not a reverse either- it's just forced in stress that fucks shit up . In the case of beads it's not shrunk per sey but gathered creating the same effect.

Soooooo how do you flatten a dome? You shrink up the center or stretch out the ends and the dome flattens. (light bulb moment coming up). So we know that beads gather and that sorta shrinks the center right ? Now if the end goal is a flat panel, but you want beads in it too then it should be domed aka stretched before you gather aka shrink the center.

If the beads go out to the edges it doesn't matter
I can't turn the bold off now - shit

 

Yes, ok, that makes sense. I have been slightly crowning the area I am going to bead before I roll the beads, so shrinking the edges to try to repair the distortion after the fact is kind of counter-intuitive, but after your post#15, the light went on. Good stuff.

 

George, Is your head splitting rite now, go ahead ask 31 another question!
I just rolled the drivers side, instead of it being 10 miles of bad roads it's only 8!

 

Did you do anything different?

 

That shouldn't be a need for Tylenol .

 

good thread bigrat !

 

I intend to! Right now. try stretching the area you are going to bead before you roll the beads, I have been doing this on practice pieces, and it works well for me.

Ok, heres the question: Vicky, if you were going to try to fix this panel, and you didn't have a shrinker (I have one, but IIRC, Brigrat doesn't) would you start by cutting the welds free and doing dime sized heat shrinks in the areas I have indicated with small circles? Or would you do something different?

 

Pre stretch to nearly full height if the bead doesn't enter and exit the panel.






First side I did was a taco. Second side I pre stretched and it laid flat. No coincidence