Flatten Smooth Sheet Metal Hammering

Proceed across creating an even row of marks.

Flatten smooth sheet metal hammering.

Then when you undo the clamps you will have a nice flat sheet of precious metal. It s more like foil. 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. Hammer across the sheet in one direction.

Planish means to flatten smooth or polish metal by rolling or hammering. Just a very smooth block of half inch stock or even a flat hammer face will do. The process of planishing uses many light blows to smooth metal which has already been formed by some other means. If you hammer softly most of the time and harder once in awhile those harder blows will stand out.

You won t really need an anvil. The tokyo based goldsmith yutaka nagai demonstrates how to hammer down a gold ingot to form a sheet. Place the sheet on a clean flat smooth steel block. A polished flatter and a polished anvil block might do it for you.

Hold the hammer lightly in your palm and let it bounce off the metal in a fluid motion. Another way would be to use a vice to press the strips between two smooth flat blocks. Hammer each blow with equal effort for uniform marks or textures. 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.

Every autobody practitioner has some favorite backing surface for hammering metal. Shaped plastic mallets used with shot bag backing is a particularly effective hand forming combination. Tape the four corners down with painter s tape or masking tape. That is almost too thin to call sheet metal.

Wet metal causes tool rust and oxides on the metal will become embedded into the sheet during hammer texturing. Keep the hammer bobbing in a straight up and down motion and just turn the metal piece.