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Great Lakes 2T1A-VR I-ESON
"the Outatime Flyer"
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November 28th - 2007
Tonight Matteo and me have started doing what we were anxiously waiting for: hammering and metal working.
The alloy I'm using for the engine cowling is 6061 T6 .040, while softer 1100 soft aluminum for the nose cowling (or maybe 3003 H14 if the sheets arrive from the USA).
The English wheel I have ordered and the planishing hammer have not arrived yet, so we decided to make an attempt to do it "the italian way".
Italians were famous for forming beautiful race and vintage cars bodies only by hand hammering on the sand bag.
They used veru soft and thick aluminum for this, while we are using the hardest heat treatable alloy (6061 T6) which is very hard to work with.
 Haing a look on the buck to see how good is the job
 Quite satisfied of the first results! |
BTW, we were too anxious to begin so we have started hammering and see what happen...
Then we started with the top panel: we began by doing some "wrestling" on the sheet and give it some bending on the longitudinal axis.
We then hand shrinked the edges and gave some more crown to the whole panel, then started hammering; We soon discovered that shrinking such a hard temper alloy has been a mistake because the marrs left by the jaws turned into cracks.
We then trimmed off the edges and kept on beating.
The panel formed quite good with heavy hammering (6061 T6 is really hard!!) but without an english wheel is practically impossible to add crown enough to fit the buck; So i decided to cut off the panel into two halfs and some more hammering gave very good results: The crown at the nose side is more compared to firewall side, so this side needs more hammering.
We now absolutely need to wait for the english wheel if we want to smooth and planish the rough surface.
Also, we will try forming these panel by using the english wheel only because it would be easier and smoother from the first step to the last one.
BTW, we had fun and have been very proud of the results of our first metal working on such a hard alloy.
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