Jerry Feather

OK. I'm kind of with you, except for the stips of paper, but what next?

Jerry Feather

I have kept the last one of these vent halves in front of me now for a few months and have continued to have my brain work on it. One of the things I have learned about forming material like metal or plastic over some kind of form is that where the material first touches the form is the place where it will stop stretching first. l just never got around to applying that to the problem here until just recently. I have a picture of the last of these that I tried to form before and I have put an X on it where the metal first touches the die and now I can tell that that is where the metal needs to stretch the most but in fact is not stretching just about at all.

The solution that finally comes to me to try is to simply remove much of that metal, since it is going to be waste anyway, and allow the metal to form around that part of the die without have to stretch over the face of it..

Tomorrow I am going to get some more metal cut to size and then figure out how best to cut a chunk of it out of the bottom where the X is in the picture. I may have to experiment some with just how much of the metal I need to cut out for the void, but that should not take too much effort until I can end up with a final pattern.

If I am right about this then I am open to working up the die for the back of the vent and then go to town making some of these. I'll need to work up some kind of jig to do the welding and some more dies to form the bottom flanges, but that should not be too difficult.

Jerry Feather

My other project for this morning did not work out and I don't want to wait for stainlees steel tomorrow, so I am going to shift to aluiminum at least to test my new wisdom. I have cut three blanks out of some aluminum scrap sheet I have around here, in three different thicknesses and will drill them to fit the dies and then cut one of them out for the void that I now think I need and then go press one. If the void does not quite work out I'll change it in the next one and so forth.

I may very well end up going simply to aluminum for this project unless in spite of my change in the process it does simply not form correctly or as good as the stainless has so far. Auminum also has some advantages in the process of completing any one of these vents, if I am able to form them, such as the welding and then cuttting out some of the necessary openings.

Stand by.

Jerry Feather

So much for Aluminum. I tried to form a couple in aluminum and it will not even form the basic shape nearly as much as the Stainless will. I'm back to stainless; but I will note that my new idea about the forming does show some promise in reagard to how I think it will work in the process. That aspect of the process in aluminum shows some promise for stainless..