Built by Hand. Beautiful by Design. Almost Complete.

Another day, another clico, another hammer blow on the Lindenokker, probably one of the world's most beautiful cars. And today is one step closer to final completion of this project. There's not many steps left to go, so it's pretty damn exciting. But what we're doing is just a final planish and clean on these quarters, the welds on both sides. Then the roof, that's where we're hopping on now, where we're going to be chucking in a couple solid rivets to call that panel complete. But before any of that happens, what we've got here is a bunch of clico holes that align this whole roof section on the back. So we're going to weld those out, planish them, and then get to the actual work. Now that's completed, let's talk a little bit about riveting. So what we're going to be doing here is we're using formal oval head solid rivets. Fun little story is, as I started my apprenticeship, the first two weeks I was just a bucker, which means you're the bucker inside the car or plane, whatever you're working on, behind aluminum, holding a bucking bar, hating life, going deaf. But today that's not me, because here we can work from the outside, hold a bucking bar here, my riveting gun here, bam bam bam bam bam, get it done. So when it comes to solid riveting, you need some pretty funny tools and I would have had to import those, but I found a guy named Fritz in Pretoria selling his whole old aviation tool set. So anything sheet metal, aviation, solid rivets, I can do. I was so damn lucky to stumble into this deal and all these toolings, because now I can confidently and competently take on almost any style sheet metal job, because I've got stuff from every style of clico to every style of countersinking tool. So it's absolutely beautiful, because everything has a home and its place. I unlock these drawers, I finish the job, I lock them, and they stay locked until the next job comes along. I got all of this because I pretty much need this drawer and this drawer, but now I have this. So we're going to be starting this by grabbing our big boy 4x riveting gun, grab a b half spring and the correct anvil for it. Oval head, like that, like that, like that. So how I was taught and how I've always done it is, we want the shank protruding past the back side of the material a distance of one and a half times the diameter of the rivet. So this is a four millimeter rivet, so it's four times 1.5 gives you six. Then we've got two sheets of 1.5 mil aluminum, that's three mils, so we want a total of nine. So what we do, we just put it in our rivet cutter, one test rivet, shabam, push, pull, cut, sheared off, now we measure this. This is giving us six millimeters, so we want to add three millimeters on. So what we do then, we just move these shims, each shim works in increments of 1.5 millimeters roughly, two shims in place, lock it, now we know each time we cut a rivet it's going to be three millimeters longer, cut, push, pull, there we go, one down with the shank length, nine millimeters, now we just repeat that process for a whole bunch of rivets. So there's a slight, slight, slight bit more preparation before we can just hammer away, and that is when you drill these holes out, they leave a small burr on the inside and the outside, so what we want to do is just take the panel off and deburr the panel and the support in the back, both sides of it. Deburr this face, that face, and the other panel, both sides. Otherwise if you don't deburr it, you're going to have that slight bit of metal in between and it's never going to seal correctly and not going to sit nice and flush. So deburr it and then it's troubleless. And then actually it's trouble free riveting. I swing hammers, I don't talk much, so yeah. Summer forte. And now we just click our panel back into place, then hop into some practice riveting before we actually blast the body with its final rivets. Just because I rivet so few and far, I don't want to make half moons and smileys on the body itself. I want to get these as perfect as can be, so we'll just do a little bit of practice before we hop in here. Another thing to be aware of is when you are riveting, you want the top material and the support in the back to be touching flush. Almost, almost perfect. If you can get it perfect, get it perfect. Because if it's not and there's a little bit of a gap and this shape doesn't follow the structure on the back side, you're going to end up with waves and hollows in your panel. Just because you're either going to be pushing this top sheet, the top skin, down to the support, or pushing the support up to the top panel. So you'll end up, and that you can't control, so you'll end up with a high here, a low there, and just waves and highs and lows. So make sure, take your time. Preparation, preparation, preparation. That your internal structure is touching your skin seamlessly all the way. And then when you put the clickers in, check. Have a look at the holes and see, hey, can I see my lower support? Is it touching my skin? If it's not, put a dolly, tap it up, get that structure corrected, and sitting and flowing. So for this practice piece, what I've got, just two scrap pieces of aluminium, and now we just drill a couple holes and that's where we're going to practice. So we're doing the exact same prep on this practice piece as we did on the car, because we want it to be as realistic as possible. We don't want it to change at all. So if this comes out correct, we know, hey, we just take this process straight to the car, settings, straight to the car, and we're going to end up with the exact same results. Should. If something starts changing, we stop, diagnose, and problem solve from there. So what I'm going to do here is I'm clamping my work piece in the table and I'm going to hold my bucking bar on the back. What we can also do is we can clamp the bucking bar to the device, and then from there, just hammer the panel. But that's not very, very realistic, because on the car, we're going to have to be holding the bucking bar anywhere. When we're riveting, we want to try to hold the bucking bar as square to our plates as possible, and the rivet gun as square as possible, because if we start wandering off, we're going to make half moons and smileys on our panels, and if our bucking bar starts wandering, the back side of the rivet, it's going to go angle and not become nice and parallel with the surface. So we want to hold them both as square. So a nice telltale sign of when the rivet is set correctly is the sound. So the tone of it, it's going to go from like a hollow, it's going to sound like your off dolly, and then as it starts pulling the material together, it's going to go to a higher pitched ping, and then we know, hey, we are there, we're on the money, we're pretty damn close. We don't want to go long after that, because then we're going to flatten out the rivet too much, and it's not going to be correct. So as it starts pinging, it's almost drive at one, two, and then it's done. So now we'll go and hold the gun not very parallel to the bucking bar, and show you what a smiley or half moon looks like. See, then everything just goes. So we can see there, it's got an edge mark, the face isn't nicely uniform and round anymore, and on the back side, if we have a look here, you can see, hey, it's just all skiff, skew, and we're not happy with it. So that's why we want to try to hold it as square as possible. We can see these ones, how much more uniform and consistent they are, because we're holding the bucking bar more square. Okay, so now, nervous, scared, not at all, no. It's only hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours that we could half moon and mess up, but we're not going to. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to put one rivet on this side, one rivet on that side, and one rivet in the center. I'm not going to start on one corner and rivet all the way across. That's because then, as it stretches, it can push the material and push it and push it and push it, stretching it, and then eventually, hey, five, six holes, ten holes down, it's no longer going to line up and we're going to have issues. So we're going to spread a couple out to start, lock it in place, we know, hey, it can't move anywhere now, and then just rivet as we want. That's all good in theory, saying, hey, hold the biking bar and the riveting gun square, 90 degrees to each other, but in practice, it's a little bit of a different story. That's why you'll see me making slight adjustments as I go, oh, I realized it wasn't perfectly square and I'll correct it and I'll move the rivet a little bit and I'll try to push it and pull it as I want to get it square in the end. You want to start as square as possible, but theory and practical, they don't always align 100%. So when you have to make a correction, don't be scared, just correct it. It's so, so, so damn satisfying having a car finally come together and seeing that the internal structures line up with the outer skin. It's so, so satisfying. I've done these couple rivets and I can see, hey, it hasn't pulled funny at all. Look at the lifelines, they're still sweet. It's a relief and a real big enjoyment. You do all that prep work and you're so confident in your work, but there's still that worry that always, always sits in the back of your mind, that slight bit of doubt. On these oval rivets, our spacing, we want about two to four times the diameter of the shank of the rivet between the edge of the rivets. It differs slightly with countersunk rivets, but these aren't countersunk. Ooh, well, we were the last rivet for today and let's not mess it up. There we go. We've set one, two, skip a few, a couple of rivets and we can see our panel is still putting and flowing 100%. There's no highs, there's no lows. The internal structure seated at 100% before we started. So we are happy with it. That's that complete. Bam, not touching that again. Now we're hopping on the quarter. So we're just going to give this planish its last planish for the final, final time. That just entails tapping down a couple of highs, bringing a couple of lows down, bring a couple of lows up and then sanding some finished lines into them. This is why I leave my panels to the end because it's been four or five months of taking this panel on and off a hundred times. And so we've knocked a couple of highs and a couple of lows because the material is somewhat annealed near the weld. So we finish it off because we know, hey, maybe it's going to go on five more times, no more than that. With the marking blue, we can instantly tell, hey, where's high, where's low, where's flowing. We can see here, this part's flowing almost perfect. Boom, big blue patch, big blue patch, big blue patch. And we can feel something's wrong there. So now we can clearly see, hey, we've got lows and a little bit of a high. So we just work them out quickly, not so quickly, but quickly. We're going to start by tapping the high down, doing off dolly work. We've got our dolly in the low and we're tapping the high down. Now we're going to go in the lows and start doing some on dolly work to bring them up. Putting these sanding lines into the panels might look completely unnecessary and most of the time it is completely unnecessary, but it portrays the work and you can see on the lifelines, hey, these panels are still fitting and flowing. So I can send customers update pictures with confidence and make sure that I include the lines in it. That way they can see, hey, this panel is straight and they're not lying to me. That's also why once I've sanded with the orbital, I'll run lines all in one direction, just so you can see the lifelines even better. Now that this is all fitted, flowing and complete in place, what we're going to do is hop on mounting this louver that you previously saw us knock out. So it's going to go something like that. So now we hop on a whole bunch of measuring, measuring, measuring, cut, measure, measure, measure, cut. And then in the end, bend it around, stretches the louvers a little bit so it sits nice and flush. Once we've got it exactly in its place, we're going to run a joggle so it sits recessed and completely flush with the rest of the body. So we can see as I'm bending these louvers getting to come around now, it's no longer really louvers as they've all pulled down and closed. So what I'm going to do is bend it all to sit 100% and then the louvers are going to be in the front where it's cut open, almost inverse. They'll be past the space material. Then I just have to stretch them up individually a little bit, a little bit, a little bit to get them to come up and be able to accept air again. I'm bending these louvers over my 2026 knee because it's the latest version of it and works pretty damn well to get very close. When it comes to the fine tweaking, we'll go to a stainless steel rod, but for now we use this engineering equipment at our hips. We can see now that's exactly what I predicted was going to happen. The louvers have all pulled below the base material. So now what we've got to do is block it and stretch it up again. That way it's going to keep the shape and then we're just going to go planish it, get it nice and clean. And there we go. We should have a fitting louver. Great stuff. So we got quite some time into hammering this front louver and as we can see, it's starting to open up and it's going to allow air in again, but the other side louvers, they are all still inverse. So we're going to stop on this one for now and we're just going to jump, block this one out a little bit and stretch it. Block this one a little bit out, stretch, planish, block, planish, block, planish, just to get them all to come around. That's going to help our panel, give it a more consistent bend. And then from there, we'll work them all again and again and again until we get the shape we're happy with. Here I am thinking we're close, but I'm just lying to myself. We've got to stretch these louvers a whole bunch more. So just hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer away. Sweet. So we have these louvers fitting 99% and they are still open for the most part. What we're going to do now, before we open them some more, we're just going to trim, we've stretched on the edge now, let's push the material forwards so they're no longer uniform. So we don't want to get, let this get too lost and then it's going to be tricky to trim it in the end. So we're going to trim them all uniform now, file them and then carry on working. But we're very, very close to what we're looking for now. So we've test fitted this louver 30, 40 times between the bench and the car and the bench and the car. And now we just need to open up the third and fourth one a little bit more before it's going to be fitting 100%. And then it's cut a hole, mount it, run a joggle and a couple more hours of other work to get it to fit. So it's not very often that I've seen louvers that actually fit and flow with a compound shape. I'll see them, but then it's an awkward shape. You've got this nice bulbous shape and then flat louvers, whereas these ones that I've managed to get so much shape into them, but the louvers themselves are still nice and neat. Now it's taken hours and hours and hours to get here, but the end result, wow, I absolutely love it, love it, love it, love it. I haven't had this much enjoyment and happiness with the end result of a panel in quite a long time because I made lots and lots of shapes, but it's not every day you get to make a panel like this. And it's just amazing. So, so good. Fitting and flowing perfectly almost with the car. If you are enjoying this content, please don't forget to like, comment, subscribe and check out the Patreon.