Eastwood Panelbeater Sandbag Demo - Just Beat It

The amount of sand in the bag is more or less a personal preference. I filled my bag to the point where it was firm, yet still gave just a little bit when I punched it with my fist. In the end I used more than 3/4 of the bag of sand.

When it comes to what type of sheetmetal to use, I use 20-gauge cold-rolled steel. The 20-gauge metal is more than stout enough to hold up on any panel, yet still malleable enough to be formed and shaped-with a little muscle of course.

By placing the piece of metal on the bag, then beating the metal with the mallet, the metal forms and stretches to the face of the hammer. For broad, round faces, use the big end of the mallet.

For intricate curves, use the backside of the hammer to pinpoint exactly where you want things to take shape.

Here's a close-up shot of how the metal forms and stretches to the hammer. As you can see, this metal was flat at one point. Now the round bubble in the middle is thanks to the bag and mallet. By the way, don't think this was the product of a few whacks of the mallet. I've hit this piece of metal quite a few times.

Before making some real "working" patches, I decided to play around with the bag. I took what I started with on the bubble and decided to test myself and get familiar with the tools by making a teardrop blister. After drawing a teardrop outline, I began whacking away with various mallets.

Here you can see that my blister is beginning to take shape.

Eventually things turned out to what you see here...

...By simply using the mallets and sandbag one can create some pretty precise shapes.

Now onto patching an area with a pretty complex compound curve. On '67-'72 Chevys the gas filler neck is originally located on the beltline towards the rear of the cab-smack dab in the middle of a fairly decent crown. When patching this area, it's either weld-in a flat piece of metal and create the curve out of filler, or fabricate a patch to match the lines of the body. The lines in the picture indicate the direction of the curves. Although the curves are invisible at the moment, just close your eyes and pretend! For starters, there's a horizontal crown running along the red line and a vertical crown running along the blue line. The point of intersection between the red and blue line is the high spot of the crown. Just above the high spot, the patch dips in towards the cab and then dips back up to follow the B-pillar-this area rests between the green lines. All in all, it's a pretty complicated patch panel that needs to be fabbed around all of these points of interests-but it's doable with the beater bag.

First things first: I needed to make a template of the opening to be filled. I used a white sheet of paper, placed it over the hole, and ran my fingers over the paper to get my pattern.

Next, I transferred my pattern to the metal. Because of the area highlighted in green, in caption No. 16, the patch has to be formed on both sides. To create the curve highlighted in green, I first drew a straight line across the top of my patch.