Eastwood Shrinker Stretcher - Shrink, Stretch, And Swim

First we'll start with the shrinker. To use the tool insert the work piece between the jaws and push down on the lever. This will engage the jaws and shrink the metal. When the lever is pushed the press multiplies your pressure by a leverage factor of 45, which means it doesn't take much man force to shape the metal. To get the proper curve, just repeat the process in general area until the desired shape is achieved.

Here is our piece of metal after being worked on the shrinker. We worked about 5-inches of metal to get this 90-degree bend. As you can see, the shrinker can make a precise and clean shape. Both the Eastwood shrinker and stretcher can create curves with a radius as tight as 3 inches.

Next we worked the metal with the stretcher. It operates just like the shrinker.

Here is the metal after being stretched. Like the shrinked metal, the stretched metal is clean and precise. Only this time the metal is flowing the opposite direction.

Here is the same straight piece of metal we began with. As you can see, the shapes are defined, which makes the shrinker/strecther a versatile tool for many applications.

This tool is something that can be used for an abundance of jobs. One job on hand is filling in the top portion of a firewall. On '67-72 Chevy trucks there is a gap at the top between the firewall and cowl. Using the Eastwood shrinker/strecther we can create the perfect piece to place between the two.

We started with a 20-gauge piece of sheetmetal with a break at 90-degrees. The top of the metal, to fill the gap, is a 1 1/4-inch. The bottom half is a 1/2-inch, the height of the gap. First, the piece was placed in position, and marks were made where the curve began and ended.

Using the shrinker we began to shape the metal to the desired shape. On a side note, we did find that if you overcompensate the curve on the shrinker you can take it to the stretcher to correct your error, and vice versa.

Things are beginning to take shape. It's a good idea to frequently check your progress during this process, because it's quite easy to go overboard.

Here is the finished piece, matching the contour of the firewall move for move.

Because we didn't have a long enough piece for the firewall, we had to make two separate sections and weld them together. Once welded together we stretched the center of the piece to follow the contour of the center of the firewall.

Here is our filler piece installed. The new piece really accentuates and caps off (literally) the smoothed firewall. Also notice how it flows with the curves of the firewall.

While visiting KA Custom (Huntington Beach, CA) we noticed this transmission tunnel they fabricated with their Eastwood shrinker/stretcher. Look close you will notice the outer circle was created with the stretcher, while the inner circle was made using the shrinker.