Help with making shallow grooves in sheetmetal

24 Guage is fairly light weight metal. I build small models where sheet metal roofing is used. The corrugations amount to smaller than 1/16 inch for my scale. There are several methods to accomplish this, almost as many as there are modelers. The method I prefer is the use of coat hanger wire spaced on a block with another pounded down between from above.

Coat hanger wire will yield about the size you are looking for. I have a stock of 1mm welding wire that I use for mine. I use brass shim stock which is probably too light for your purposes.

Any "tool" is an extrapalation of some similar lesser tool to accomplish more work, with less effort, in larger quantities. The question here is how much of this metal you need to produce. There are rolling machines that can produce thousands of square yards in an afternoon. But they will be horrendously costly. Then there is the simple version like modelers use. They produce a few square feet in a couple of days. But their cost is a few cents total. Where your needs and desires lies will be between these two limits.

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Thanks for that. I am looking at making a die to do the job using pressure from bolts to do the pressing.
Dave
 
This u tube guy has a lot of sheet metal forming vids , does some on hammer forming and dies too.


Stu
 
24-gauge is only about 0.024" thick. You mentioned cutting groove 1/32" thick or about 0.031" thick. I've assuming you want a bead, not a groove cut into the metal. I think it's mentioned above, but you could make a simple die with plywood and a steel/aluminum plate. Mill a groove in the steel plate and superglue in a length of 1/32" TIG rod (or similar). The rod will need to proud of the surface of the plate to form the bead. Set the sheet metal between the plate and the plywood and press the bead into the sheet metal.

Another thought is to clamp the sheet metal down to a piece of plywood on the bottom and two strips up top with space between the two upper pieces. Take a wide chisel and hammer in the bead.

Bruce
 
Thanks, I don’t really want to go to the expense of a bead roller just for this one project.
Yup, if you are not going to get into sheetmetal I get it. It will be interesting to see what you come up with and how it works for you. With 25ga for drawers or any longer shapes I need a hem for the edges or they get bowed and floppy and guess what makes a beautiful tight hem? Yup, a bead roller with a hem set.

Not until I started digging deeper into YouTube vids did I realize how essential to so many processes a bead roller is. Especially if you don’t have the space for big dedicated machines like a stomp shear and break. I have just a 2 car garage to work out of and do welding, fabrication, machining(lathe, mill, shaper) and sheetmetal is something I’ve always loved and wanted to do since the 70’s. So besides hand tools my first major step towards that was a 3n1 and for everything shorter than 30” and 18ga it is adequate. But then I needed to do a curved flange and realized that’s what a bead roller does and few other machines do.

You could do a hammer form but it is very time consuming and material intensive. Most like Ron Covel use MDF for his hammer forms. But wood and wood working tools are not cheap either. I found my beader on Craigslist for $125 with a HD stand and a good set of rollers. With my lathe and mill I have made other rolls for it. If I was going to go minimal now I would just have a beader and shrinke/stretchers. With the beader and the right dies not only can you do beads of all different sizes, you can shear, breaks of different angles, do radiused edges (for like tanks), radiused flanges and hems just to name a few. For working thin sheetmetal into a way stiffer stronger form bead rollers can’t be beat.
 
Good luck with your project,keep thinking on it.... you'll figure it out.

Bead roller;
Like a nice stationary edge sander(wood shop).... you'll wonder how you got along without it,in pretty short order. I'd say these two examples rate near the top of this, "secret gem" tool class. Just sayin.

Back to OP; I'd go to our H frame press and press,one line at a time. And can see where,....development on this might have application when the bead roller hits a roadblock?
 
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