http://www.alexbealer.org Last posts in topic Cotonti Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:47:59 -0400
Thanks for all the tips in the forum and sent to be personally. I've completed the project that prompted this question and wanted to share the results.

Project description:
I'm building a 'super sucker' side-draft chimney based on the design on anvilfire. (Okay, I finally got tired of too much smoke in the shop at times!).

How I bent the metal:
The key tips that helped me are: (1)simply using two pieces of angle iron clamped together and making multiple passes with a hammer to bend the metal. (from Dan Tull) (2) fullering a crease along the line before bending (a George Dixon technique shared by John Myers). The first tip really simplified my tooling and helped quite a bit. The second tip made the process much easier and precise.

Here's a picture of hammering the crease. I'm using basically a rounded fuller for leaf veining to make the crease (you need to avoid using something sharp, like a chisel. Otherwise you risk creating a fracture).



Next you clamp the sheet metal down between two hefty pieces of angle iron:


Ensure the crease is down and aligned with the edge of the angle iron:


Then you apply slight down pressure on the free end of the metal, and lightly hammer across the sheet where you want to bend it:


Keep making passes until you reach 90 deg.:



I made a couple of extra passes to clean up the bend and give it a more professional look:



Here's the super sucker just about finished. If you made it to the Sept 09 meeting you would see it complete and painted on the 'show and tell' table:

]]> Sun, 23 Aug 2009 03:08:47 -0400
Keep clicking next at the bottom of each page.

http://www.majorleagueduning.com/tech/Brake/brake1.htm]]> Sat, 22 Aug 2009 02:30:58 -0400
Someone at the last meeting said that George Dixon's book had something on this, but I have not found it.

Thanks in advance!
Jim]]> Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:44:00 -0400