How to Use a Shrinker Stretcher on Sheet Metals

If you're serious about metal fabrication, one of those must have tools is a shrinker and a stretcher. And usually you can do that with just one tool, it's just a matter of changing the jaws. The jaws actually determine whether it's shrinking or stretching. I've got a couple of em so I can quickly move from doing one shrinking operation to a stretching operation or back and forth depending on what I need. The important things is you know like any tool like this you wanna keep your fingers free of the jaws when you're actually engaging them.

You also always wanna wear eye protection whenever you're using any kind of metal fabrication tools because stuff can happen when you least expect it. With that, let's explore, with this one, we're gonna explore a stretch to start with. And basically what's going to happen is the metal is going to be pulled apart in small increments and that allows us to form contours and pieces of metal that you couldn't normally form. I've used shrinkers and stretchers to fit various metal parts when you get patch panels and stuff like that, they never fit quite right and a lot of times I need to go in and shrink and stretch in certain areas to get a better fit. Also used em on this car to get the fender skirts to exactly fit perfectly.

It's surprising how when I first bolted the fender skirts on how off they were. But by doing some shrinking and stretching in areas I could get a good fit. So that's a good tool not only if you're doing some serious metal fabrication. It's a good tool just to get things to fit right and maneuver metal a little bit better. So with that, let's take a look at first, with this one making a stretch.

I have actually a U channel left over from another project we were working on, but we're gonna actually stretch this. And this will actually cause this, what's currently now a flat panel, to actually curve. And it's a matter of feeding it into the jaws. And your foot decides how much or how little it's actually gonna stretch. And then you go back over pieces once it is stretched.

You'll notice we're not getting a lot of movement cause we have actually two bends on this one. So we're gonna flip it over now. And if you look closely, we've started to get this sort of stretch. So what's happening is, is it's stretching this metal out along this edge. And again you can start to see where in time we start to actually really starting to move a lot of metal here.

Gonna flip it over. Work on this side again. And now you can see just by using, just by stretching this metal along this edge, we've been able to create a nice curve in this metal. It's actually useful if you're doing some rocker panel fabrication, under dash panel, where you got an extra panel under your dash to hold your switches and gauges. Can really create a custom look as opposed to just being a stamp piece of metal.

With that let's move over and we'll show you what a shrink looks like on this section. Now that we've got our stretching done, I wanna change out the jaws on this, so we can do some shrinking. And it's a pretty simple process, just eight screws and we can pull these jaws off. Because that's the entire action remains the same, it's just the jaws that decide whether it's shrinking or stretching. So with that, let's get this changed over.

And we'll start doing some stretching. We've already stretched the metal on this edge and you can see how it's created this concave curve. So now let's go and we'll actually shrink the metal on this side and create a curve going to other way. As you guide your piece through here, you wanna make sure you move it about the same amount each time. So you create a continual curve that doesn't have sharp spikes in it.

Now you have, what we've done here is we've stretched this edge, created this curve, we've shrunk this edge and created this curve. When you're stretching, it's actually pulling the metal thinner. And when you're shrinking, it's actually pushing the metal together and causing it to bunch up. And that's how we use the shrinker stretcher. Great tool to have in the shop.

Gets the job done when you need to really fit parts the way you want or create parts from scratch, great tool.