| Basic Home Fabrication - Tech Tools and More
One of the great things about working for Project Car is how we each pitch in to find creative ways to get a job done. It’s amazing what you can do with simple hand tools like a hammer, hacksaw, measuring tape, marker, drill, metal cutting file, bench vise and a little creativity. To give you a sample of how we use these tools, we’re showing you the highlights of some ghetto-fab work we did on Project Black Flag. Please put your safety glasses on and follow along.
The Bench Vise
These simple “C” brackets were whipped up with minimal effort starting with 1/8” strips of aluminum flat bar that you can find at a local hardware store. All our bends were made using a bench vise as a makeshift sheetmetal brake.
|
Basic Home Fabrication - Tech Tools and More
The purpose of these brackets is to mount our homemade aluminum air dam and our soon-to-be installed lower splitter on Project Black Flag. Note how we used simple 90-degree bends to mount the air dam to the bumper and to create a flat surface for attaching the future splitter. This “custom” set-up only cost us about 30 bucks!
| Basic Home Fabrication - Tech Tools and More
The Rivet Gun-AKA Pop Riveter
| 01 The versatile pop riveter has been used over many years for building everything from toys and household items to airplanes and race cars. This tool allows us the ease of attaching two pieces of metal to each other “blindly” (no access is needed on the reverse side of the panel), as an option to using self-tapping screws or a nut/bolt combo. Plus, it gives you that cool “riveted” look. Here’s how it works:
| 14 You can see how in just a couple hours “we” created a functioning custom grille for only a few bucks in materials. OK…Yamz did a great job on this piece. Him taking the time to measure the location of each hole for the rivets made a huge difference in the end.
The Hole Saw
