FMH LIVE: Fabrication Equipment for a Home Shop

Hey everyone. Welcome to this month's Fix my Hog event. I'm Tommy Clutch Creal owner and operator of High Compression Garage and Chopper College. We're stoked to be working with Fix my Hog on this intro video to fabrication. Welcome aboard for all you viewers. Two things that we're gonna cover today, we're gonna go through some at home fabrication projects you guys can do, also some little tips and tricks along the way and also how to set up a nice little fab shop in your garage or work area and save some money and cut some corners and make your bike unique to yourself as well. Before I get into things, make sure below that you'll see a banner down there. We've got a spring and fall apparel sale going on so make sure to check that out. Also hit that like or follow button on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and get some good knowledge through that as well. Thanks of joining again. As you can see I brought quite a bit of tools in the area and we're gonna be trying to go through quite a bit today. Little background on me for everyone who doesn't know about me, I've been building bikes for the past 15 years for celebrities, our former vice president Joe Biden. Made a name for myself with my fabrication and craftsmanship. You're in good hands and we're gonna be learning a lot today through this video. A little bit about some of the tools with fabrication. You might see a lot of guys on TV, some of those shows they're using a planishing hammer, English wheel, shrinker and stretcher. I'm gonna bring it down one more level and go through some of the hand tools and go through these and show you how they work. Also we're gonna get into building a little seat pan and battery box for you at home. Obviously with anything you're doing with bikes and if it's service or fabrication we always wanna make sure we've got all that protective gear. Respirator or face mask, ear plugs are good. We get jamming on this planishing hammer and your ears will beat like a heartbeat. Make sure all the protective gear is on board. A few of the fab tools that we use around here and I use on the daily basis with the guys, these are the main sheet metal tools. These are called dollies. You got different dollies where you have heel. You have this one as well. These are mainly used cutting and pounding corners into pieces, for instance a gas tank. If you're making a gas tank and you need to put a radius on a corner and it's a tight radius, you take one of these find the nice radius on whatever one may fit and just get hammering away, that's one good thing about metal. There's not too much power you can put into it. We have teardrop mallets. These are the holy grail of sheet metal work and fabrication. These are of different sizes as you can see. All these, we have this one which is gonna put a small scar into the metal, this one more of a larger scar into the metal and striking it through. When using these we've got a sandbag right here. You can use BBs in these as well and you can also pick these up, probably your local store. All we're doing with the metal on these, for instance, I got a seat pan right here. We're taking these through and hammering it all the way through to give us a radius. That's the purpose of these teardrop mallets is to just continue to strike away and form that metal for us. On this end we have anvil. This one is not used too much with a lot of the metal working but the end of it right here, the toe, we do use as a replacement for these dollies too. Next up we have some of the basic stuff. We got grinders. Simple grinders, you're gonna be using these a lot. I'm sure a lot of you may have these already at home and some air tools. We have air sander and we have an air nibbler for actually cutting out the sheet metal. Easier way to cut out metal are hand sheers. These hand sheers will take an 18 gauge piece of metal and cut through it like butter. These are actually able to give you a pretty clean cut without too much grinding and burning on the end. We also have outta sight and outta your reach here a sheet metal break. They have a lot of bench top sheet metal breaks for sale online and bench top ones you can bolt right to your wood bench. All sheet metal breaks do is actually give you a clean, nice bend. For instance on this do it yourself battery box these two bends were done on a sheet metal break. Took about two minutes to do it, set it up and bend that metal directly how you want it. I've always loved working with metal because there's not too much you can ever take off or have on there, unlike wood that's a little bit harder to work with because you need more precise cuts and everything. Sheet metal break is very useful and they have them . Also bigger guys, good stuff to work with. Load toys are planishing hammer. This one is used for shrinking the metal. When I say shrinking the metal, as you'll see later on in the video when we get actually beating the metal around you'll see a lot of rivets or waves we call them into the side of the metal. That's the metal actually expanding. What we wanna do is contract the metal and get it back to a workfull form where we're gonna butt it up to another piece. What we do on this, we have an upper. This is pretty much all we're using. We have a few different dies for the bottom. This is a flat die right there. We also have some different crowns. The crown on top of that is just determining your radius. If you're gonna go for a smaller radius, a smaller curve, you're gonna use a smaller anvil on the bottom. If you're going for a larger one then you're gonna use a larger crown on that. Right here we've got a shrinker and stretcher. This does very similar work as a planishing hammer does. The shrinker actually, all you're doing is pressing down the peddle here and it's contracting the metal. On the opposite end of shrinking it, the stretcher will actually expand the metal which we wanna do on some instances with gas tanks. When we build gas tanks and we're going towards the front of the gas tank we wanna open up the metal to butt up against the other panel that we're building. This is very useful and very affordable at home as well. Then the English wheel. This is a smaller version and actually an at home version you can have, these are available in bench top too. This is used to smooth out all those scars you put in your metal. When we get to actually beating the metal, tear drop mallets are used with the sandbag. After you have all those bumps and rivets in there we roll it right through the English wheel and go with the grain of that and smooth that all out so that's nice and pretty at the end. Also at the bottom of this we have different anvils. This will determine the radiuses again. This one is very slight, hopefully you can see that. Very slight radius in there but just enough to actually smooth it out and we have more severe radiuses for getting those corners in there. Keep in mind this is a nice little tool to have. A lot of the other ones, we'll go through a Beverly shear is something that you can get for a bench top in your garage and simply cut right through the metal like butter with that. It helps cutting with larger bends like this. This one we actually cut out with a Beverly shear. You can hopefully see there's a lot of burs up here on the sides that we're gonna take down but Beverly shear does leave a little bit of a clean surface to get to at the end. That's another nice piece. Just to recap and give you guys a rundown on some of these tools, there is a nice little package that we could say right now that you could bring to your garage if you're trying to start to get into the trade of fabrication or craftsmanship or even just try it out, you can get a set of tear drop mallets, dies, and a sandbag and that'll get you going. Also look at the bench top English wheel, sometimes you can pull out a sheath metal break. Also a shrinker and stretcher. Those are good little pieces to have in your garage and even tinkering around with. You never know where this could go. I'll tell you what, from experienced fabrication on motorcycles will definitely make your bike unique and give you a sense of pride and craftsmanship in doing that. Every bike we build is handmade including gas tanks and frames and that goes to give you a lot of pride in what you're doing. Hopefully you guys are gonna get a lot outta this. Jumping into a little bit of background on metal. When we're using metal we typically use 16 or 18 gauge, just like wire, we're gaging the metal off the thickness. On motorcycles specifically we're using about 16 gauge to 18 gauge all the time. We use 16 gauge on all our gas tanks, all our fenders, oil tanks, battery boxes we'll use about 18 gauge. We don't ever get to 20 gauge just because of how thin it is and it has the opportunity to be brittle and break along the way, definitely something more rigid rather than soft. I would highly suggest if you're gonna get into building your own seat pan, battery box, even going into fenders along the way that you look at a 16 gauge metal. Another little thing about metal, when you're purchasing this if you go to your local Menard's home Depot, wherever you go, they have these in 48" by 48" slots and you can purchase one of those for building your seat pan here. When you do get your metal every supplier of metal will get a different form on the front. What I mean by that is there's some kind of film, protective lubricant on top of this, that you wanna make sure that's taken off before you do any of the metal work allowing for, for instance when you're laying down a weld on something that it is a good working surface that you start with. For instance our manufacturer sends it out with an oil coating just to make sure it's not rusting and upon delivery of all our metal we've gotta wipe it down and we've got to get a good working surface right off the bat. You may be wondering about aluminum. Good luck with that one. Aluminum's a whole different beast working with it. Working with metal it's a lot easier to control the metal when it's shrinking, stretching, forming on it's own. With aluminum one blow with the tear drop mallet and you're pretty much stuck there. Aluminum has a brushed surface as many of you guys know and that will continue to show through out the English wheel, planishing hammer. By no means am I saying that it can't be done, it's just a different type of metal to work with. I would suggest using mild steel, not stainless steel in picking your metals as well with fabrication. Point being is that with stainless it's a lot harder for chrome to attach to it. For instance if you're building a sissy bar or saddle bag supports and you want to send that out to chrome later on, you're gonna see a lot of cracking or stress crack they look like because it's just not able to mate through that whole chroming process of nickel, copper, chrome. Keep that in mind when picking your metals that there are specific kinds. Also feel free to put in the question log with Fix my Hog if you have a question on your metals, which one you should use? Shoot us a quick question on that as well and we'll be able to help you with that. At home projects, I wanna get going with some of this metal here. These tools are being quiet. At home projects, I would highly suggest working on a beginner's entry level project which would be a seat pan or a battery box. From there you can get to different levels. For instance here are, this is one of our seat pans that we continually make. It's a one piece seat pan. All we do is put in the break in the front. You can see how we've taken all the film off the front, bend it and then we rolled this one through the English wheel to give us that nice little surface. Nice little radius in there. Another one we have here, this is actually one that is going out to upholstery. What we've done on this one, cut it out, smooth it out and get a slight bend in here. A lot of times if you're looking just to do slight bend, just do it by hand or if you have a sheet metal break at home put it from under it and then start forming the metal. You can pretty much feel the metal, it sounds corny and cheesy but you get in with the metal and zone in and you can feel where it fits and it doesn't. Work with the metal, it'll tell you what it needs to do. Then this one, this is a copper one we did with rivets all in it. Copper is a different type to work with. The other projects, battery boxes. These guys, you can take one right off your bike. If you're working at home on a project and looking to swap it up, this would be something that you could make unique and claim to be your own image because it doesn't take too much to do this. Definitely for a beginner building these boxes is quite easy. All you're gonna be doing is putting a radius in the side, welding out the corners and making sure it's secure. You don't have to worry so much about doing a pressure test to it or air testing it to make sure it can hold liquid as you do with gas tanks and oil tanks but this is something that is a little bit easier along the way. Sissy bars and I know we have a question on I'll get to, I'm gonna cover, but handle bars, that's the other thing. Surprisingly enough you see a lot of guys building handlebars. These are part of our in house handlebars that we make. This is one and a quarter outer diameter tubing going down to one inch grips. You can eventually make your own handlebars if you're a daredevil, if you're a good welder and feel comfortable enough actually making those welds. This is a good project to do as well. You can get a tubing bender from your local store that's relatively cheap to do that too, so take a look at that. Sissy bars. This thing right here which you actually see is where we bend a lot of our sissy bars, that simple. Weld this right into place, we determine our radius right off that, heat it up with our oxy acetylene and then bend away. That's definitely an at home project to do too because it takes one piece of metal tubing you can buy from your local hardware store and get into that and put a couple welds on a bung and you're golden, good to go. I'm sure you guys had enough about this stuff. We're going to get into using some of these tools now. I've already cheated and cut out along the way a seat pan. This is made out of 18 gauge. 18 is the choice that we went with this one but when we're using some of these tools obviously glasses is one big thing. You get a lot of burns and potential for all these metals to come up. If we wanted to put a radius in this metal right here let's say we want to be able to cushion it right around our backend, what we're gonna start doing it working out way outwards, same thing with gas tanks. When we build gas tanks and want a large radius on the outside, we work inward to outward. That gives the metal the opportunity to expand. You've got to realize that that metal is all molecules inside so they start doing their own things internally and moving things around. What we're gonna start doing is start scoring the metal right here in the middle and go about an inch from the outside. I'm gonna start going around this area right here. This will allow us to get that little pivot point in there. You're gonna make sure you're hitting on a good surface with this. Remember you can put BBs, sand, whatever you want into these shop bags. You can probably already see that was a flat piece of metal. See how it's starting to take it's own shape right there, this is where all the tools are gonna start coming into place. It's gonna be a little rough to see that but there are a lot of score marks on there. You can probably do this for about 10, 15 minutes and get all the way around. We're just gonna do the side right here for today. Now you can really see how it's starting to come up. This is where we're gonna actually start taking the shrinker and pulling the metal together to get that lip to come up a little bit farther. Keep in mind when you're using these tools you gotta lay out a template. We've got many templates for reoccurring products we make. Even using, if you're gonna do a one time project at home make sure you make a quick template of it because then you can refer back to that for use in measuring things out. Now that we have some of this done I can be doing this for the next 45 minutes so we have some of that done but we're gonna go and shrink that metal. You're gonna see how it comes up and starts rotating around with our shrinker and stretcher. What we're doing, inside the shrinker and stretcher there's jaws. We wanna make sure this is all the way inserted to the back. We're gonna come up that far. I'm actually just take this about half inch in and start working my way around that side. All you're doing is applying pressure to the pedal and for that table top ones you're gonna have a little lever, a little handle. This is gonna start to smooth out that outside area. This is really fun stuff when you get into doing this more often. All we're doing is moving around circular motion and shrinking it up. Now, I'm sure you all can see that. There's a big, big difference than when we first started on this side. That side was straight, now we're actually starting to curve that metal around to form it to where we want. You continue to do that all the way around and get this outer lip put into place. I'm just gonna do it a couple more times to get us flush all the way down to about here and all the way back there and we should be rocking, should be golden on this one. With the stretcher we actually want to go the opposite way and stretch the metal out, we would do the same process all the way through. Eventually we will use the stretcher on this because we're gonna be consolidating a lot of that metal right there and we'll use that to spread it out a little bit on the outside. You can also hopefully see there's no waves put into this. It's pretty much straight on the outside. If we did another couple passes with that this would be turned up a little bit, it'd be looking pretty good. All right. Gonna show you a few things on the English wheel. We're buzzing right through time. When setting up the English wheel I highly suggest, this is one really wicked tool to have at home, get one of the bench top ones, start working with the metal, I call these things a finger jammer because I got flat fingers getting it between those wheels. When using this, put some WD-40 on the wheels, your main wheel and your anvil. What we're gonna do, there's a little gap in between the two wheels here, hopefully you can see that. We're gonna start using the bottom handle, bringing it up, we're gonna spin the main wheel just so they touch. Just like that. Now that bottom wheel's caught on there. We're actually gonna work in half inch increments turning that wheel as we go through. To start on an English wheel cup your fingers like this, get them outta the way, get them way outta there. You're gonna actually spin this front wheel and just get it right in there. You can see it's rocky, moving all around right on those scarring points that we made. Right there, that's the spot right there. What I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna do a half inch turn, tighten it all the way up and we're gonna work with the metal. What I mean by that is that you'll feel that starting to catch sometimes. "Go with the grain" of the metal. We're gonna lock our fingers onto this and we're just gonna start going back and forth. All we're doing is letting the equipment, as I tell the guys let the equipment do the work. You just be the mastermind behind it. You can see how that's shaking a little bit but it's actually coming out. If you need to get over to this side, turn it and do the same thing. Come on right through and start rocking it. I'm gonna crank it down another quarter turn and get a good little smooth piece in here. That actually is turning out a lot quicker than I anticipated. Now looking at this corner right here, this is the corner that we did the shrinker on. We shrunk all this down. It's gonna start to expand again. Hopefully all goes right it's actually gonna have the waves. You're gonna see slight waves in this because the metal's expanding. When we're applying pressure to this metal right now what it's doing is expanding all those molecules from trying to escape. By no means am I a chemist but I do know that stuff about metallurgy. We'll move this on there, keep working it all the way around and notice our bottom anvil, we're using a slightly smaller crown. What I'll do is I'll pop in a larger crown. You can see how that works. Now it's not so rocky. We're actually smoothing out all those scoring marks. Before we had a lot of, doing my best to show you guys here, it's a lot smoother back here now than it was before. There is a big difference between this flat spot, right here there's actually a component where it's butted out. Then you get your piece of metal back into this. Gonna wanna loosen it back up, do the same thing with that wheel. I'm gonna show you real quick a larger crown wheel that we have for this bottom. As you can see on that one, that's a pretty wicked bend in there. We're gonna use this one and this will give yourself a drastic, drastic difference in that metal. Doing battery boxes and stuff with the English wheel, I don't know how crazy some of you wanna get with your at home projects but definitely possible to get into it with a battery box. If you're looking to make a dome looking one all you're gonna do is take your end caps and this is if you're following these standards of building a box, keep in mind what you're gonna make, your end caps right here is domes. Cut out a piece of metal, but the little extra metal on the ends for grinding and also for that metal to shrink down. That's another tip for you when cutting these things out for any component of fabrication make sure you cut a little bit extra. It's a lot easier to take it down with a grinder, a shear, whatever you're using to take that down, but put a little extra. With that dome you're just gonna make that one piece on the outside here and run it through the English wheel. It's a lot smaller piece like this, put it on, make your scaring points and get that to a point where you like the radius on it and work it through the planishing hammer, shrink it on the ends all the way around and then run it through the English wheel to give it a nice, smooth surface on the outside. Like I said, this is probably the fun part about the job of building bikes is doing all this stuff by hand. We're gonna do this a little bit more, I'm gonna jump over some other projects that try and get as much in as we can for you guys here today. Like I said, quarter inch increments. Same thing with the bench tops. Gotta have the same thing. Again, you got a pretty wicked bend. To recap, you're doing a seat pan, if you're doing battery box with a dome, the main tools that you're gonna use, you're gonna use your tear drop mallets. Those are to put scoring marks in it to start giving you that radius then you're gonna move on to the shrinker and stretcher. Start shrinking down all those waves on the end to get that metal more consolidated to work with. Pretty much what we can say is that this is your finalizing tool, outside of grinding and getting prepped for painter or powder coat this is gonna be the English wheel. Getting all those bumps and getting you a nice looking pretty end cap to it. If you're gonna look for something to save a few bucks on and modify your bike up I highly recommend doing a seat pan. It's pretty simple, you can cut it out to your own specs. You can even do a two piece. We've done these in two pieces where we cut right here and from there just weld them on together. That's where I would recommend going with at home. That battery box and later on getting to that daredevil stuff of building and things. Where you're gonna need bucks and a buck is pretty much a template or gas tanks which, real quick, this is a buck we built for one of our tanks. What we did with this is actually, this is more for a bobberish style. We've taken wood and cut the radiuses that we want for the top right here and have it step down, go into here to the sides. When we're working with the metal, we're not just guesstimating where we need to go with it. We can actually work with the metal, bring it right up to this and say, we need to work on this back section a little bit more, this front section a little bit more and get it to follow the contour of this buck. If you do get into doing gas tanks this would definitely, for beginners, make one of these guys and just use it as your template, your navigational roadmap and by the end of it you'll come out with something pretty cool, I can guarantee you that. All right, next we're doing these battery boxes. Say you're looking to make a sissy bar battery box, whatever it may be. At some point in that fabrication process you're gonna need to weld something or bond something together in some shape or fashion and obviously it's in our industry it's welding, those are just what we do. Right here I've got a mig welder and a tig welder. Primarily we're using mig, we always use gas on our mig instead of flux core which the gas comes out in the wire. This one we're just running straight gas through it. That is just mostly used on tacking things together. We want a more precise, more glamorous look in weld that looks pretty darn good we're gonna use our tig because we can control that weld a lot more. With tig it can be a little bit harder just due to the fact that we have a foot pedal or you have a finger trigger. You've got filler metal at the same time and you have to be able to watch the metal at the pace it's burning and make sure you're filling enough metal in there along the way. There's a lot more to it with choosing your correct tungsten, choosing the correct filler metal. If you were to ask what is the best welder to start out with just for not welding every before? I would highly suggest using a mig because you can pick it right up, give it gas and if you're gonna try flux core just make sure you're gonna penetrating welds. Get that thing set up at home. Dial it up to the company's recommended gauge and just lay a couple of tacks. What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna show you real quick tacking this into place, this battery box. We've already precut obviously these pieces of metal so they fit right on the outside of here. Let's see which ones are gonna work for us right now. We'll use this side. We're gonna bend this up a little bit. That's gonna be this one. We're gonna tack this, overlap the metals and use the metal as our filler with the tig. Then for the mig we're just gonna lay a couple quick tacks down. When doing a sissy bar like I mentioned what you're gonna do is lay a full bead all the way around your mounting points on there. I know someone had a question about sport linkage for your saddle bag for instance. We make tons of those. There is, number one, you gonna probably wanna use a 1018 mild steel 5/8 diameter piece of round bar. The reason being is that is a thicker metal and depending on the size of your saddle bags you don't have to worry about any stress fractures going through on that. I would recommend that metal for you on that. With sissy bars, same thing. You're gonna make mounting points on there and you're gonna wanna lay full beads as well. Maybe you're gonna have to make sure that heat is turned up, slow down your wire speed a little bit so you're burning it not too quickly but just enough not to melt all the way through and start working your way around the seat cupping. Then also if you're doing that with tig, good part about this is you're able to control your heat of amperage coming outta there to burn through it. We got enough time? We're gonna pull through and I'm gonna turn this mig one up for this. We pre label our welders to know what gauge we can go to. I'm gonna actually turn this one, the heat, way down. You can hear the metal working when you want it to. Obviously always make sure you have your hood when welding. Fabrication this is your stuff if you're not doing one piece or anything that would require welding that would be it. With welding this is gonna be our last thing besides grinding that down. All right, you want about an 8th of an inch of the wire showing. What I'm gonna do is use wire cutters to do that but just get it right to where we want it right there. Placing these pieces together make sure they're secure. They're not gonna wobble or do anything, they're gonna lay down tack. What I mean by that is when you're actually welding the metal it's obviously distorting and trying to go it's own way with the heat. With this one we'd like to make a tack right here and the same thing on this side preventing it from going side to side on there. I'm gonna move this little guy back here and with mig welding you can actually use magnets which is outta reach from me here but I would actually use a magnet to hold this piece together. Tig welding you can't use magnets because that pulse, that area you have there is actually gonna be draw to the magnet rather than your working surface. Lay down two tacks. You can hear that jumping, that's not what you want by any means. It's not penetrating, it's just jumping around on there. You can see that tack is not melted through, it's just on the outside. You may see that if you're a beginning welder that's on the outside, you didn't penetrate any of the metals. Keep that in mind, you wanna make sure you're penetrating the metal all the way through. That's the sounds you wanna hear. That's working for us right there. That actually went through, you don't have the big blob like that on the top. We're gonna do the same thing on this side. You're gonna have to get used to working with your welder, you can actually listen to it and know when it's actually penetrating and sometimes when it's just hoping around. A lot of these fabrication tools too, you're just gonna have to get used to using them and what they're capable of doing. If you're using your tear drop mallet and you see that you dropped down to a different size, it'll work just as good for that. Shear, gonna let the equipment do the work for you. Same thing with the welders. Let them do the work for you. We got our two tacks right here. What we do at this point, we lay full bead all the way around and then just take air grinder, electric grinder with a larger grip and get that brought down to a workable surface for us. Touching on grinders. Take a step back on this one. The higher number you have on work numbers is the finer type of sanding tool it is. When you're first starting to bring down your welds, if you have a larger weld that's not flush you wanna use a lower grip. For instance a 36 and 80 grip we have right here. I would use a 36. Start bringing that down, work the metal down and then start jumping up to higher grips to get a nice final touch. At the end of your piece that you're actually crafting you want to make sure there's not any scoring marks, there's not any areas on there that would come through if you're getting the piece chrome or powder coat. Reason being is that it's gonna show right through. What you're sending out is what you're gonna get back. If you see a big divot in there, go with your welder and grind that down to a smooth surface. I'm a perfectionist here and everyone knows that I can be a little bit over the top on making sure every little detail is good but in the long run it pays off. When doing that make sure the piece going out is the piece you want coming back. Mig welding, hopefully that helps a little bit with tacking it and getting your pieces together. Like I said that's gonna be probably your go to machine if you wanted to start doing this in your garage. Just pick on up, a 180 is definitely a good size for your garage and definitely right in a good price range. Now with our good old tig machine. This is what we're gonna be doing a lot of the fine details with, with our sissy bars, our handlebars for instance. Let's see how close we get you in on this one. All those were tig weld on the outside. Same thing on here, we have to do very little grinding. It's the best part about tig welding is that you're finish is pretty much there. When we go under on our handlebars you'll see that same thing with the finish. If you're looking to do something along with caliber in your garage or on your bike, may not be a bad idea and you don't feel comfortable tig welding may not be a bad idea to send it out and let them weld it up but you got metal provide something unique for that. Tig welding, let's get the other cap on here. Down here I actually have foot control and you can start seeing levels fluctuating on here. This is gonna be actually controlling our torch right here. I've got the unit grounded out. All I'm gonna do is I'm gonna overlap the metal together so we can use the metal to fill itself right here. Use gloves, definitely use gloves. I don't like personally using them right off the bat but we're gonna control, we've got 90 amps. I'm gonna probably put it around 30 and we're gonna tack weld this right on the outside. This piece doesn't fit but we're gonna make it work. We didn't get enough metal on that one. Take it back, otherwise we're gonna be using filler. Normally I'd be using the filler rod right now and setting this work surface up so it's not moving on me but this is an easier way of doing things, cleaner way. Back end there, just a nice little clean tack, you're good to go. See a lot of people in the industry using their tig welders all the time, it's their go to tool to work with. Give you a rundown now. Rundown on what we went through here. When you're doing sheet metal fabrication specifically on your bike, a step or a guide for you, you wanna pick the right tools to work with. You wanna keep in mind, layout your vision so at the end of the day you know what you're building. You have that template in place. It involved various stages. So you're gonna be starting with a raw form, working through it and then finishing stage. When we get to that finishing stage remember what I said about those grips, that different types of finish in the area. You want to make sure that that piece going out is what you wanna see in return. Also I know specifically for myself and many of the guys I work with is that you take a lot of pride in these pieces so always good to get that powder coater or that chrome on your piece you're looking at, critique it. Take your time with this. Fabrication is no rush for me. Building a gas tank even takes maybe two, three, four, five days. Guys speed away through it on TV but it really doesn't take that long to do that. Run down and take your time with that. I know there's a few questions that came through up coming to this video and some questions I've encountered along the way and I'll bring those up now. One of them I got to was what type of welder is best for beginners? That welder is the mig welder. Just a purpose that you can really sting it, the stinger. You can learn it pretty quickly. You have two gauges to work with for your wire speed and your heat and from there it's just getting used to the machine and how it works. Once you grind those welds down you really the seem them but keep working on that and if you're looking to make an entry way into this industry, make a hobby outta this or just doing it a couple times I would encourage you to get a welder along the way so you can tinker around with that as well. Another question that came in was what's the best beginner project? I've had this in the past too with people. I think it's all based on the person not necessarily the project. If you're looking to save a few bucks or even wanna be able to say I built that gas tank or I built that sissy bar, seat pan, I would encourage you to start with everything to build your confidence up on the level of a seat pan or a battery box. A battery box, keep in mind, still takes some welding experience but that is an easier way of going. Seat pan, good part about this is you just have to weld a few things if you want to, otherwise you build your seat pan, cut out the template, form the metal and send it out to appolstry. Different approaches and different projects for people. I know there's people who have come up who have said "I wanna build a sissy bar out of all chain link." You gotta weld each one individually. Give yourself some slack if you're really coming into this as a new beginner. Give yourself some slack and work up to different projects. Get used to the tools, I can never say that enough. Let the tools do their work and get used to that. Another question we had come in, cost to make versus after market cost? That one varies but I think that's the level of craftsmanship or artistry into what we do, you can definitely, instead of buying a $250 or $300 seat, build your own seat pan and send it out. For those daredevils, build a set of handlebars and sending those out. It doesn't take that much to build those but a lot of considerations along the way. Something that just hit me, if you're building a set of handlebars and you're drilling out for internal wiring or you're using a fly by wire throttle on there and you're gonna run right through those bars, make sure you debur everything. One of the biggest thing for your tool belt as a fabricator is files. You're gonna debur everything that you go through. Same thing on seat pans, you're gonna debur everything so they don't come through. On those handlebars that is something you wanna make sure of because all it takes is one piece of metal to catch a wire and all of a sudden you're grounding that power wire out or splicing it in half and you've got a little fire under your seat. Keep that in mind. Another one, can you make a career outta this trade? Love this one. Absolutely. You can definitely make a career outta this. It all depends on what you get into. If you get into building gas tanks or even smaller projects, someone comes into your little shop at home, your garage and says, "Build this for me or fabricate this for me." You can start that way but I wouldn't suggest jumping right into it and saying I'll make a career outta this because it does take time to get up to an advanced level or get moving to where you feel comfortable making anything for people. I'm the first one to say I'm by no means a master, no means an expert in this even though other people classify me as but there's always something new to learn along the way. Building things at home, you're gonna figure out I didn't know that before, offer something else up to people. Pay it forward attitude in our industry and you know motorcycle industry is one of the best. You're always learning new things along the way with that. What's a good starter kit of tools for this? I covered this briefly when we first started this live event and I guess it depends on what you're building. If you want a wide variety of tools and equipment to use I would highly suggest using bench top tools. They're more cost effective, they're affordable on that end and you can get a feel for things and always upgrade beyond that. I wouldn't suggest getting a $1500 planishing hammer and say I'm gonna go into this and see what happens. If you wanna list of pieces of tools or equipment to get it's the tear drop mallets, it's gonna be the sand bag or shop bag, all depends, different vendors call it different things. Hammer and dollies. These are the dollies again or we can beat against these and get a different radius. There are also hammers out there that are shrinking hammers which if you're putting this dolly on top of your shop bag like this and you're pulling your corner over, I don't have one in sight here but we can actually, the hammer has pretty much circular area on the inside which will shrink the metal as well. If you're not up to getting whole shrinking, stretching unit you can always just get a shrinking hammer and just start working the metal that way and upgrade from there. Then an English wheel. An English wheel is another good go to tool and what you can make is endless on those things. This is a nice little piece and they do come affordable. Add that to your repertoire in your garage or shop and get going with that. Last would be assortment of air tools. You wanna make sure you have a good grinder, good bits, files. As I mentioned with the handlebars and then some kind of form of cutting the metal. We use side cutters and texto shears sometimes but there are different kinds. Make sure you have a good, effective way of cutting that metal. Those would be the big things, you can always upgrade beyond that. Then we had another question that I touched on quickly about the materials you recommend fabricating saddle bag supports? Question is the type of material to build a saddle bag going into a sissy bar supports and things of that. 1018 is a good metal to go to. Make sure it's not stainless steel, it's a mild steel, more carbon in the steel. The reason being you can form it a lot easier and then the finishing is that much easier. You can use any diameter that you want but do keep in mind that if you are using this as a back rest and sissy bar along with your luggage bags or saddle bags that you want a heavier gauge and you wanna make sure your supports for that are in place too. To expand on that, sissy bars, if you're building those out you have two bungs on the side that you welded on and said that's good enough. Keep in mind that thing's gonna tip right backwards. Gonna need another area to support that piece going into a flange or somewhere else on your rear fender. From there you should be able to have enough strength behind those support to support anyone in the back behind you or luggage if your putting it back there as well. Keep that in mind as your building anything, fabricating anything. I like to make sure to go over the top on safety with it that we don't have anything back. I've never had a bike back and that's for the reason that we take our time, we go through it, certainly wanna make sure that it's top notch quality and I think that's a good thing to share with you guys is that you wanna make sure that everything is secure. You can never do it too much. You can never go overboard I should say and make sure everything's in place. All in all I'll tell you, fabrication is a fun part of the motorcycle industry. I know a lot of people personally that just go out and buy certain components and do their add ons or cosmetic touch ups and I don't know, they've shared with me in the past that it's difficult to get in the fabrication industry because they don't have the confidence or just don't have the knowledge and I can tell you from experience that once you get into it you're hooked. You're hooked like riding. You just start working with the tools and put your head down to the grind store and start making your battery box or your seat pan, sissy bar, luggage racks, things like that. Make your own templates or models as you go. You have a wood top bench, as I told someone in the past, you have a wood top bench, take a circular tire for instance like from a lawnmower and use that as a guiding tool, a steel one and that's your radius that you'll get around it. A lot of it is just thinking outta the box and definitely doing it. I encourage a lot of you guys to give it a whirl an hopefully find a passion and enjoy doing it, it's a big part of our industry obviously doing this metal work. Hopefully everyone all enjoyed this segment on fabrication and gathered a lot out of it. Make sure you go on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and like and follow all those pages. FixmyHog.com with additional videos. I know we've got a video up there if your motorcycle running wobble. Check that out and that spring and fall apparel sale, gotta get it while it lasts. Go for it. Thanks guys and hopefully talk to you soon. Thanks.