My one buddy has a '30 A sedan that needs a filled top. My second buddy has a large english wheel he built from a kit. He'd only done small panels (a couple feet square) with it so far. We'd like to roll a crown in some flat sheet 18ga for the A. Last Saturday we brought the flat sheet to the shop (different town than the car) and began rolling with his biggest radius lower wheel in full lengths across the top, both N-S and E-W. We spaced about an inch between each swipe. It began to place a small crown in the panel, but not much. We went full lengths a couple times each way. I though maybe we were stretching all the way to the edges, which is not really what we want to do. We want to create a shallow bowl, so we should leave the edges alone and stretch in the middle, right? So next we ran all over the panel, both directions, up to about 6" from the edge. Then we did the same, staying 12" from the edge. By now, three hours later, we were laying the panel on a couple benches, and we could see an inch or so crown in it, but it was so wobbly that we weren't sure if it was getting close or not. We took the panel back to the other town and laid it on the car. We were maybe halfway there. Lots of flop still in the edges as the middle of the panel rested on the top bows. Here's my question(s): Were we doing it right so far? Was stopping short of the edges by 6" and then 12" the right process? And maybe we need to go back and just do it some more? Or were we wasting time? What's the proper procedure for putting a roof-type crown in a large panel like this? PS: My arms were KILLING ME that evening!
Well my experience is that if you can find a faster way to make the crown then do it that way and smooth everything out in the E-wheel. Tree stump / shot bag / pitch pot / helve hammer, etc.. The E-wheel works well for high crown smaller parts but your gentle sweep, large panel may be hard to gently pound into shape without over-stretching it locally and creating a bigger task trying to shrink it down again. So you may not have other options than to wheel it out some more. One other option I plan on using on my roof fill job on my '49 Anglia is to get a donor car roof panel from something like a mini van or SUV and just fine tune the contour to mate up to your car. One other word of advice is if you weld it in you will get some shrinking locally near the weld area so I always put a little additional crown around the edge to compensate for the fact that the edge will shrink a little bit from the welding.
Yup, I did watch that Lazze video before we went back the second time. We tried the X pattern instead of the + pattern the second time. It got us a lot of crown. Well, that and rolling the thing for another two hours. We took it back to the car in the other town and when we laid it on it had plenty of crown. Some corners could have used a bit more work (more crown in the back, less in the front), but that would have been caught if we had the actual body sitting next to us when we did the wheeling. All in all, I had a great time and would love to have my own big english wheel (I just have a small benchtop in my shop).
I don't have access to an English wheel so I'm always looking at newer cars for shapes I might need in the future. Doesn't hurt that I was in tool and die for the first 8 years of my career running class A panels for GM. Frenchtown flyer is right on, getting a panel that's been stamped with the correct shape is ahead of the game.
It takes a lot of time and effort too get a the metal to conform to what you are wanting it to. It takes years of using a English wheel to become proficient and in doing so the ease and time is considerable reduced. We jumped in the deep end of the pool and did a filled roof on a coupe using a cheesy HF English wheel and had absolutely no idea of what we were doing and I am sure it took us a good day to finally get the crown to fit the car. The end result was far from perfect but after some massaging it worked out well. Today, 6 years later and after having watch countless videos we are a little better at it but this is a craft that takes years to get right. HRP
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