You hear lots of wild stories at car shows. Some are even true. One tale that really got our attention involved a shop that's cranking out brand-new aluminum '63 Pontiac Super Duty fenders, '62 Z11 Impala hoods, '63 Galaxie lightweight bumpers, '64-'65 Race Hemi hood scoops, and a dazzling assortment of other exotic goodies. It had to be a joke-this stuff is the rarest of the rare. But it's true. The shop is Wayne Williams Metal Shaping, and his handformed reproductions are as close as you can get to original without investing millions on dies and massive stamping equipment.
Wayne opened his first body shop in 1958 back in his home state of Illinois. He specialized in custom bodywork and was the man to see for a shave, chop, channel, or french. Since then, he's perfected a way of duplicating metal stampings with the use of a mold. It goes like this. Say a customer wants an aluminum door for his '64 Race Hemi. He brings a standard steel door to Wayne Williams, and the door is painstakingly disassembled. Welds are drilled, cut, or ground, then a female mold is made from each individual stamping. The female molds are coated with adhesive-backed wax equal to the thickness of the final aluminum part, and special cement is poured into the mold. What results is a male replica that is then used as a hammer form, or buck, upon which an aluminum sheet is clamped and the tedious panel-beating begins. Upon completion, the new handformed aluminum panels are welded together, and presto, you've got a door.
Without Wayne's ingenious technique of pulling a mold from the original part, the finished product would be an interpretation of the original, not a duplicate. There's a big difference. Sure, there's still plenty of highly skilled handforming with specialized hammers, but the mold simplifies the process and ensures a perfect replica with all of the original contours, wrinkles, and dimensions. While the demonstrations shown here are specific to the realm of high-dollar factory Super Stock restorations, the technique applies equally to street rod, drag race, or custom machinery. Check it out and let your mind ponder the possibilities. If you want to know more, Wayne will soon be offering a how-to videotape that goes into further detail.
