Paul Bradley shet metal

T

Theduke23

Junior Member
Does anyone know if Paul Bradley is still making 1940 mercury sheet metal parts.
I apparently can’t message people yet here until I have enough post so I’d though I’d start here.
 
There were no finer floorboards than those made by Paul. Not sure if he’s even in the hobby anymore, plenty of dissapointing stories abound.
 
It's also a bummer that his patterns or other tooling used to make the floorboards stay with him. It's happening too often these days, they don't pass things on, or they want a ton of money for them, and then never sell and often get thrown out.
 
I have a set of bradley 40 ford floor pans in the original shipping crate if you are interested. Not cheap to ship im in maine
 
From what I undertand, The Bradley floor pans were hand swaged using specially cut bucks, then the metal was cut and pounded out to accurate dimensions with some welding for the difficult parts of a pan. In a previous discussion about this. Another member mentioned that a shop he worked for had cut and fabricated the steel bucks for the Bradley floors.

Having made limited use wood bucks for such panels and fabricating many swage tools to do the forming, I have an understanding of what it would take to do that. The entire Statue of Liberty was formed in the repousse metal forming process that is thousands of years old. They were lucky to use the softer and easily annealable copper sheets to do that job. Steel can also be annealed or heated for forming where it needs to be stretched so it's not as difficult as some might think. Making patterns for the bucks is the hard part. Modern cutting machinery makes it easier but it also has to be braked or bent to the proper shapes and sizes that will result in accurate fabrication.This required resizing dimensions of the bucks to make the end product come out the correct sizes.

Folks were lucky to have Paul doing that work for them in his hayday but I think he got overwhelmed and couldn't keep up. I believe his son got involved and took over but was behind the power curve already. Instead of putting folks on a waiting list and contacting them when he was ready to start on their stuff for payment, he took in payments with no lead time on completion. He eventually tried to just make them for the parts vendors but he was already in dire straights. All good things come to an end. Some a good end and some not so good.
 
rotorwrench said:
From what I undertand, The Bradley floor pans were hand swaged using specially cut bucks, then the metal was cut and pounded out to accurate dimensions with some welding for the difficult parts of a pan. In a previous discussion about this. Another member mentioned that a shop he worked for had cut and fabricated the steel bucks for the Bradley floors.

Having made limited use wood bucks for such panels and fabricating many swage tools to do the forming, I have an understanding of what it would take to do that. The entire Statue of Liberty was formed in the repousse metal forming process that is thousands of years old. They were lucky to use the softer and easily annealable copper sheets to do that job. Steel can also be annealed or heated for forming where it needs to be stretched so it's not as difficult as some might think. Making patterns for the bucks is the hard part. Modern cutting machinery makes it easier but it also has to be braked or bent to the proper shapes and sizes that will result in accurate fabrication.This required resizing dimensions of the bucks to make the end product come out the correct sizes.

Folks were lucky to have Paul doing that work for them in his hayday but I think he got overwhelmed and couldn't keep up. I believe his son got involved and took over but was behind the power curve already. Instead of putting folks on a waiting list and contacting them when he was ready to start on their stuff for payment, he took in payments with no lead time on completion. He eventually tried to just make them for the parts vendors but he was already in dire straights. All good things come to an end. Some a good end and some not so good.
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I could not have stated what you have better or more accurately. Thank you.
 
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