We do a lot of joint projects for King Kustoms And Hot Rods. This one was quite a challenge. The job was to replicate the bead detail from a stock 32 Ford firewall into a new custom firewall being built from scratch. Real 32 Ford parts are worth a fortune today so when you get really nice parts it might be a good idea to not chop it up. We made up a set of dies for the bead roller. I started by pressing clay into the stock firewall bead. Then the shape was carefully measured and drawn in AutoCad. Then The shape was plotted every .010 then those numbers are put into a spreadsheet program to give me a chart of the coordinates i need to machine to. We don't have CNC machines here so we have to do complicated shapes this way and i have been thrilled with the results. We machined the dies from 4140 prehard tool steel as we wanted to avoid heat treating costs. you must have a hardened surface to bead roll a surface with four radiuses. 4140 is not easy to machine but we got through it. I just can't believe how good it turned out. check out the finished product in bare metal.
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