The Wrong Tools for the Job

The wrong tools for the job can cause more damage than help if you aren't careful. When working on sheet metal a wrong swing of a hammer, the wrong hammer and dolly can cause damage to your panel that will take 3-4 times as long to fix. You ALWAYS want to match your hammer face and dolly to the shape of the panel your working on. If you're working on a flat panel this isn't ever a panel, but as soon as you get into a corner, a curve, or a hard-to-reach area you may need to go outside your simple starter kit of hammers and dollies.

Custom Paint Doesn't come from a Can! Eastwood Intermix System

Truly restoring a car means that you have to follow the factory specs of what your car should have looked like when new. There isn't much room for creativity when building up your car in that manner. On the other hand custom cars leave the doors wide open for what you can do. Whether its a mild custom with just some things done to clean up the appearance of your vehicle or if it involves creating an entire new persona of your stocker. When it comes to painting a custom car you don't want to just go with a stock color that everyone else at the next show will have on their car. Custom Paint mixing can be a scary task and many factors can change the color or "formula" along the way. We decided to take away some of the complexity of picking and mixing a custom color for your ride.

Bear with us while we update our CSS and Sidebar tonight to something a little more modern

Please feel free to leave comments, complaints, issues, death threats below.

Thanks

(Also banner is up to you guys, we may have a banner contest)

(Also please update your flair!)

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As a sidenote, if you care about the History of /r/Cars

• Dec 8th 2008 - 99 subscribers - https://web.archive.org/web/20081208180709/http://www.reddit.com/r/cars

• Jun 14th 2011- 4k subscribers - https://web.archive.org/web/20110614224044/http://www.reddit.com/r/cars

• Oct 29 2012 - 50k subscribers - https://web.archive.org/web/20121029141407/http://www.reddit.com/r/cars

• Dec 21 2013 - 100k subscribers - https://web.archive.org/web/20131221164213/http://www.reddit.com/r/cars

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Eastwood Plastic Resurfacer Saves Weathered Motorcycle Parts- A Customer Review

We always encourage customers to leave us feedback and reviews on products, but every now and then a customer goes above and beyond! Recently Rick M. sent us a link to a review he did on our Plastic Resurfacer on his motorcycle discussion forum. The "after photos" and review was so good we had to pass it on to customers. This entire review below is unedited and as-posted on the Concours Owners Group Forum. Thanks for sharing Rick, we appreciate the feedback!

What Makes Us Tick- Andy B. Eastwood Product Manager

I came from the Automotive Aftermarket where I developed OEM replacement parts for the better part of a decade. As a kid my addiction to cars started with building a go-cart with my father who is a pipe fitter by trade. I then graduated to British sports cars, which broke the bank for a high school student trying to build off of a part time budget. Eventually, I found myself working on Jeeps and other off-road vehicles. Little did I know, a cheap Jeep Cherokee project would shape my automotive future.

'What car should I buy' mega thread. Also help others buy. Post in here.

Keep in mind there is also /r/whatcarshouldibuy if you want to start your very own thread.

Stand alone car choosing threads will be deleted. If you have settled on a specific model or particular car, by all means start a thread. *

Please note your budget, general location (US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Asia, etc), and your preferred features.

Looking for a used car and don't know how to tell the good from the bad? Our used car buying thread in the sidebar can help.

/r/askcarsales also has a great sidebar FAQ for buying both new and used cars.

Looking for a $5K car give or take? We have a graphic in the sidebar.

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*You're welcome to make a thread starter on a specific car/model, but remember that /r/cars is a clearing house for general car info. The best resource when asking about a specific car is targeted forums. Considering an Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Porsche, or Land Rover? Find the specific subreddit (master list in the sidebar) or outside forums. Chances are that your questions have been answered many times over. Nobody here is going to have the kind of indepth info you can find there.

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We start a new thread on this topic every Sunday night. Feel free to repost if you have posted late in the week.

submitted by /u/verdegrrl
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How to Tighten up a Weld Seam on a Patch Panel.

No one's perfect, but we can do our best to strive to get the closest we can get to perfection every day. These ideals are the same whether you're a cook, a machinist, a landscaper, or a guy in his garage building an old car or motorcycle. One big lesson I've learned over the past few years has been to slow down and take the time to make sure that parts fit together as nice as possible before welding. Just blindly rough cutting a piece and trying to make it fit another piece is going to end with an uneven weld seam and won't end well!

Tech Tip- How to Move a Bent Edge

On my Model A project I channeled the car down over the chassis which required me to build new floor supports and pans. The way I built it all up I needed to make 6 small pans that would fit down in between each supports. This meant I had to nail the bends on either edge so the final inside measurement allowed the pans to drop down in between the supports tightly. I will have to take the pans in and out throughout the rest of the project so I wanted them to drop in and fit snug, but not so tight I needed to use a hammer to force them in (this could also bow the panel).

Tips to Making Custom Floor Pans for your Car

Mark recently decided to take on a resto-mod oddball in a Chevy Corvair. This neglected Chevy bastard-child was rescued from a local scrap yard and had seen some questionable repairs and better days. His first step in the rebuild of the car was getting the structure of the car rebuilt and solid before he started customizing the car. The first area of concern was the floor; or lack of it.

The Sorcery of Tuck Shrinking Sheet Metal

The simplest way to describe how metal moves or reacts when you shrink or stretch it is to imagine pizza dough. When you stretch the dough out to make a larger pie you'll see it gets larger AND thinner as you stretch it out. If you watch the process they start with a small, thick, round piece of dough that they kneed out until the dough is the desired thickness and put the excess material on the edges for the "crust" The same if they wanted to make the pie smaller, you'd need to gather the dough together creating bunches and smooth it all together until it was the desired shape. Metal reacts almost EXACTLY the same.

The Sorcery of Tuck Shrinking Sheet Metal

The simplest way to describe how metal moves or reacts when you shrink or stretch it is to imagine pizza dough. When you stretch the dough out to make a larger pie you'll see it gets larger AND thinner as you stretch it out. If you watch the process they start with a small, thick, round piece of dough that they kneed out until the dough is the desired thickness and put the excess material on the edges for the "crust" The same if they wanted to make the pie smaller, you'd need to gather the dough together creating bunches and smooth it all together until it was the desired shape. Metal reacts almost EXACTLY the same.

Turbo Refinish with Powder Coating

Whether you are adding a turbo to your car or just refinishing the one you already have the best and really only option is powder coating.  Eastwood has everything you need to completely restore your turbo in an extremely durable corrosion-free finish that other coatings simply can't match.

5 Trail Items You Need on Your Truck

When you're out on the trail your cell phone isn't going to save you. There's some key items you'll need to get your rig going when broken down or stuck on the trail. We decided to put together a short list of our favorite Eastwood products that are trail must-haves. These aren't the only items you need, but will definitely be key items for off-road vehicle survival!

Where and when do I use Epoxy Primer on my project?

In the past self etching primer was the go-to coating to apply over bare metal on a car. Metal required little prep work to apply it, it flashes/drys quickly, and it came in 1K Aerosol cans for small jobs. In the past 5-10 years you've probably been hearing more people talk about Epoxy Primers and their use as opposed to self etching primer. We decided to give you some insight on where and when epoxy primer works best.

How to Make A Free Tuck Shrinking Fork

You may not realize it, but many of our Eastwood tools are dreamt up and prototyped the same way you build things at home. We have a problem or see a need for a tool to help do a job right and we build something ourselves. I recently needed to shrink the edge of a panel that was on a vehicle and I couldn't get a shrinker stretcher on it to shrink. An alternative method is to "Tuck-Shrink" the area and use a hammer and dolly to shrink the metal into itself. I decided to make my own homemade tuck shrink tool from some old tools for free I had laying around and show you the process.

Hands on Cars Episode 1- How to Inspect and Evaluate a Project Car

The first episode of Hand on Cars, from Eastwood and Kevin Tetz, body work expert, paint wizard and all around car guy. In the first episode Kevin takes you through the process of inspecting a prospective project car before buying it. The car in question? One of the nearly quarter million 1978 Camaros Chevy built, but this one is a Z28 which makes it one of only about 50,000.

Complex Rust Patch Panel Made Easy

At times rust repair can be ultra simple; cut the old rust out, cut a square of fresh metal and weld it in. But those repairs aren't usually as frequent as we'd like. Rust seems to like to creep into a curved area or into a body line that takes more care to repair. I recently decided to tackle a large rusty area of the rear portion of the floor on Project Pile House.

How to Channel A Ford Model A

Back in the late 1940's-1960's it was pretty easy to distinguish if a hot rod in a magazine was built on the east coast or on the west. One of the big differences is how the profile and stance of the car differed. An "east coast hot rod" was easily identifiable by its low ride height and body channeled pretty hard over the chassis without chopping or lowering the roof. It seems as the years went on guys were channeling and lowering their cars more and more until there was almost no ground clearance and no headroom from the raised floor.

How To Retrofit Modern Gauges in Your Classic

 A retro looking dash for a 60's Chevy truck will cost you about $400+, that's a lot to spend on just the dash.  Depending on your gauge layout there is another affordable option that will not only retain a classic original look, it will also allow the use of modern gauges.  In this article I'll show you how to retrofit modern gauges into an original cluster by only making a few minor modifications to the factory hardware.

How to Keep Metal from Warping While Bead Rolling

If you have a bead roller, and you try to add a wide or deep bead to a thin piece of metal, or multiple beads to the same piece, you will find the metal starts to deform. You may get perfect beads in the piece you are working on, but it suddenly looks like a metal potato chip. That is because the bead roller does not necessarily stretch the metal as it presses beads into it. If you have an English wheel you can fix this problem before you begin. This problem is especially bad when rolling beads that don’t go all the way to the edge, or rolling different length beads in the same panel. Follow along as we show you a simple way to keep your panel straight when bead rolling.