Flatten Smooth Sheet Metal Hammering

Tape the four corners down with painter s tape or masking tape.

Flatten smooth sheet metal hammering.

Place the sheet on a clean flat smooth steel block. If you hammer softly most of the time and harder once in awhile those harder blows will stand out. As you hammer metal on a shot bag it dishes out. Proceed across creating an even row of marks.

Hold the hammer lightly in your palm and let it bounce off the metal in a fluid motion. Shaped plastic mallets used with shot bag backing is a particularly effective hand forming combination. It s more like foil. Then when you undo the clamps you will have a nice flat sheet of precious metal.

A simple small dent on a flat or gently curved panel is the easiest to remove and as long as the backside of the panel can be accessed the dent can be erased using a hammer and dolly hammering. Keep the hammer bobbing in a straight up and down motion and just turn the metal piece. Mark both a vertical and a horizontal line through the centers of the sheet. Hammer each blow with equal effort for uniform marks or textures.

The tokyo based goldsmith yutaka nagai demonstrates how to hammer down a gold ingot to form a sheet. Planish means to flatten smooth or polish metal by rolling or hammering. Hammer across the sheet in one direction. The process of planishing uses many light blows to smooth metal which has already been formed by some other means.

Another way would be to use a vice to press the strips between two smooth flat blocks. That is almost too thin to call sheet metal. A polished flatter and a polished anvil block might do it for you. First anneal the sheet then grip the sheet between two sheets of 1 8 thick flat stock steel sheet gripped tightly using steel g clamps then anneal the steel sheets until they are dull red and let it cool without quenching.

This provides relatively smooth forming and controlled stretching in the same operation. Every autobody practitioner has some favorite backing surface for hammering metal.