The Cal-look Lounge

Hi Everybody,

As the most of you know, I have to redo my alum panels.
I'm looking around witch kind of material I should use, Stian talked me about Aircraft alum, this should be much stronger than the standard alum plates.
If their is anybody with experience in this matter, please tell me.


Thx.
 
Sven

There is a guy in France that made alu panels for our VW's.

http://blackhands.skynetblogs.be/  (Edit: I' ve took the wrong links  ::) )

There also is a member of the DAS that makes some nice panels. I can't remember his name but he has the Fastback with the Corvair engine.

emerson

That's it.  ;)

Is their anybody who has a telephone number from Emerson.

pm sent  ;)

Sven-
Ric @ Bigwigracecars does some amazing work,he uses 6061-T4 in .032” for the interiors.5052 is probably the most common alloy,and works just fine.If you can get 3003, it’s really soft, and you can do just about anything in that alloy without much distortion.

-Stian

hallo sven,

i work on an airport and i see guys working with aircraft alu, they told me and showed me when you would like to bend it
you have to be more careful with it because it crack easier than normal alu.

henk!!!

the Aircraft alum is 7050 or 7075 but is not available in sheet, just in plate. We used 5754 for price an easy to obtain it!

Thx j-f for the link

a+

cedric

You made great job, I follow you blog each weeks and find a lot's of inspiration.  ;) ;)

I can recommend cedrics work, I had some made, there was a small problem, this was no problem he made another set and dropped them off at eBI, never met him, as I was always too busy at the show.

Awesome work.

have you receive the mail ???

Yes I have, thx.

you could use S1C for non-structual panels as it bends really well, has fairly good rigidity and cuts nicely. If you are swaging panels, S1C is easy to bead-roll. It is readily available off the shelf. For structual panels NS3 is a good choice. It's quite tough, but cuts reasonably well and shapes well with an English wheel. It folds pretty good, too. Both of these grades of ali respond well to annealing with oxy-accetylene. We use these grades of aluminium on historic sports cars such as Jaguar D-Types etc. These ali types weld really well with oxy-accetylene, too. Not sure if the codes of the aluminium are just UK codes or international codes.

Duralumin (aircraft stuff) is very expensive, hard to work due to the high copper content (about 12%, from memory...) and has the tendency to crack along tight fold lines. It is also tricky to bead roll (will make your swaging machine groan!). It fatigues with age, too. I would save yourself grief and time by avoiding this unecessary metal for your car. Matt

Thanks Matt

Is there any company in Europe doing nice ali panels for race cars?

Cheers,
Basti

  Jim & Trevor at Cotsweld

http://www.cotsweld.co.uk/

What Richie said.

Thanks everybody...!