At Classic metal Shaping its all about working efficiently while turning out high quality. Wire edging is a very time consuming job and very hard on the body over time and can cause RSI because of all the squeezing. In this video I show machines and tools I built to make it easier and quicker. It took me many years to come up with the pneumatic wire edge closing tool but it is a godsend. The flanging dies were something I developed in my workshop. They are unique and give me a big advantage over my rivals doing this by hand. These tools do the job much quicker and just as neatly or even neater than any other methods I have seen. There are large specialised machines like the Erco Flanger which can do these jobs but these cost an absolute fortune (costs which have to be passed on to the customer). They are also very time consuming to set up and difficult to operate. There is also a limit to what can physically be picked up and fed through the machine so a limit to the jobs which can be done on them. Power bead rollers can be used but he same problem exist when wire edging with a bead roller, fine for a bucket but not for a complex wing or the edge of a body tub. I believe that this pneumatic tool is the best solution. Doing these things by hand is fine for the hobbyist but doing this for a living means charging customers for all that time and doing the amount of flanging and wire edging that a professional coachbuilder or panel maker has to do by hand is not ideal.
