Matthew Walker is continuing to work on his project to rewire the Hayes Teardrop. This Sunday he managed to remove interior panels from the front dome to expose wiring for the marker lights.
This photo ‘exposes’ a long lost feature of bus & coach construction: panel beating. General Motors and other automobile manufacturers were begining to introduce stamping dies in mass production. It was expensive and could only be justified when mass producing vehicles. But low volume production (yes, Hayes bus assembly was as low-production as you can get!) relied on manual techniques to shape metal.
The ‘panel beater’ was a highly skilled trade. Numerous techniques were used to bend metal to the required shape. Metal doesn’t naturally curve without be forced to change shape. So the craftsmen used leather ‘shot bags’ filled with sand or shot, hammering and mallets over wooden forms, and a device called an ‘English Wheel’. This stretches and smooths sheet metal between a flat upper wheel and a domed lower wheel, allowing the craftsperson to gradually form double‑curvature shapes like fenders and body panels.
The term ‘panel beater’ has now but all disppeared from the vehicle vernacular, replaced by bodyman or person. Panels are stamped, or many times replaced by fibreglass and straight box like structures that need very little bending.