Flatten Smooth Sheet Metal Hammering

Hammer across the sheet in one direction.

Flatten smooth sheet metal hammering. Another way would be to use a vice to press the strips between two smooth flat blocks. Hold the hammer lightly in your palm and let it bounce off the metal in a fluid motion. Mark both a vertical and a horizontal line through the centers of the sheet. Hammer each blow with equal effort for uniform marks or textures.

Then when you undo the clamps you will have a nice flat sheet of precious metal. Shaped plastic mallets used with shot bag backing is a particularly effective hand forming combination. Proceed across creating an even row of marks. The tokyo based goldsmith yutaka nagai demonstrates how to hammer down a gold ingot to form a sheet.

It s more like foil. This provides relatively smooth forming and controlled stretching in the same operation. You won t really need an anvil. Planish means to flatten smooth or polish metal by rolling or hammering.

Place the sheet on a clean flat smooth steel block. Wet metal causes tool rust and oxides on the metal will become embedded into the sheet during hammer texturing. A simple small dent on a flat or gently curved panel is the easiest to remove and as long as the backside of the panel can be accessed the dent can be erased using a hammer and dolly hammering. As you hammer metal on a shot bag it dishes out.

Keep the hammer bobbing in a straight up and down motion and just turn the metal piece. That is almost too thin to call sheet metal. Just a very smooth block of half inch stock or even a flat hammer face will do. If you hammer softly most of the time and harder once in awhile those harder blows will stand out.

The process of planishing uses many light blows to smooth metal which has already been formed by some other means. First anneal the sheet then grip the sheet between two sheets of 1 8 thick flat stock steel sheet gripped tightly using steel g clamps then anneal the steel sheets until they are dull red and let it cool without quenching.