Templating — What You Need To Know

Transcript

- Hi and welcome to today's webinar which focuses on producing templates. Now there's no denying that motorsport fabrication is a time consuming process and the amount of items that need to be fitted to a chassis throughout the modification process can really add up. For this reason, we need to work a little smarter and employ some extra preparation techniques to assist us with a clean and professional fit and finish. A good way to save time is by producing a template prior to producing our part. A template is a pattern used as a guide to make something.

For instance, a ruler is a template for a straight line and templates can make our life as a motorsport fabricator a lot easier. Building a template out of inexpensive and easily obtainable products means that you can perfect and proof your part before making it out of steel or aluminium. This saves time, mess worn consumables and will allow you to get your part right first time every time. So in this webinar we will take a look at the materials used to produce templates, from the tools that help us get the kind of results we are looking for in motorsport fabrication, along with a demonstration of the process of producing our very own template on a part. Remember if you have any questions on this topic then you can send those through in the chat and I'll get to them at the end.

Alright so to kick things off, I want to show you what a template is and where you would usually use one. So here I've just loaded up a little post that I posted on ETS Fab. So this just details a typical template that we would use in motorsport fabrication, this was actually worked on building the tube frame Hilux a number of years ago but this was just a tab or a bracket for one of the panels on the front. So we'll speak about this in detail soon but I'm using 1 mm polycarbonate sheet and then that is transferred back onto mild steel. We drill out all the necessary bits and pieces and produce the part.

So the backbone of this is really producing that template and it allows us to get these parts right first time every time. As you can see there, sitting on the car, that actually mounted the indicator and that's just one of probably 100 if not more of those little brackets and templates that I've produced for that vehicle. So you start to get an idea for the amount of time that a template can save you if you were to do those by trial and error. So with that quick little preview out of the way, we can take a look at the materials used for template construction. First up we have paper and it really doesn't need much of an introduction.

This is just your usual A4 white paper and it's easily available, it's easy to trace out and it's also easy to cut and can be a great tool for a quick template. I don't need to show you what paper looks like because it's simply just a piece of A4 paper. But I will speak to you about some of the processes of templating that I use quite often. Now when we talk about templates, you're probably going to be thinking that we're tracing something out. This is applicable in this instance and one thing that I like to use paper for is figuring out hole positions and working back off something.

Obviously with paper we can't really see through it but one of the handy little ways in which we can actually measure something. So take this part for instance, we're going to be doing a few processes on this today. This is just a shifter mount off a Quaife sequential 6 speed. If I wanted to fill in this gap here at the top and to use paper to do so, I'd be sitting it up against there. Now dirty hands here are a real help to figure out centre hold positions.

So with dirty fingers you can just run around and as you can see, the edges of those are creating a bit of an outline. And because the pressure is being concentrated on the edges of these holes, then I can run around and figure out exactly where my part is. So I'm not sure whether you can see that above and I'll run that through with a pen but this is a really handy way for just making a really quick template. So once we can see those dark sections, we can fill in those hole positions and produce a really quick template that we could then transfer back onto steel by centre punching those, tracing our outlines, cutting it out with some scissors and then creating a pretty rough and ready but really easy and accessible template to make any parts that need to be covered or hole positions that need to be figured out. So keep that in mind and this always helps, the dirtier your fingers are then the better the template will work out.

You can also do this with grey lead or by marking back with a pencil or a texta. So that's paper and because of paper's lightweight nature, it does move around a bit. It can be ripper or damaged easily and it also doesn't represent curves and corners like steel so it can be a little tricky to make anything with a corner, a corner out of paper that can be translated back into steel and fit the same way. So the next material we'll talk about is cardboard and cardboard is cheap, it's easily available, is relatively easy to cut out and can be ideal for low tolerance applications like large holes in floor pans for example. Cardboard is often thick and difficult to work with internal fluted stuff, it can hinder the cutting process.

Like paper, cardboard is easily damaged and the corners can be difficult to trace back in some situations. Now in saying that, and like I said, it is a good material to be able to, say if your vehicle, like an S15 has a large cavity where the catalytic converter sits and you wanted to cut that out and fill it in with sheet metal, then you could use cardboard to trace that back. Now it doesn't, as you can see the thickness of it and the core flute on the inside, it doesn't cut very easily and it can often give us results that probably aren't that accurate but again really good for just filling a hole or doing something quick and easy. Cardboard can be good for those larger jobs and obviously it's quite cheap and easy to get. But better than cardboard is polycarbonate and one of the jokes in the industry of motorsport is CAD stands for cardboard aided design.

So that's someone who doesn't use a computer but uses a lot of cardboard and that's usually the joke that they'll make. So the next one is polycarbonate. And unlike paper and cardboard, polycarbonate is rigid and it acts like steel. I use 1 mm and 0.8 mm thick polycarbonate regularly and it's the ultimate templating material. It can be bent and contoured, it's easy to cut with some industrial sharp scissors, you can drill pilot holes and centre punch holes to give centre hole positions.

Polycarbonate does have its downsides though and the biggest of these is the cost. I'm using a roll that costs $140 for a 5 m x 1200 mm wide roll but this will last me a year or two and for that price I believe it's worth every dollar. This is especially handy when you're making gussets that you need to see through to get your template right the first time. So here we have a few different templates that I've used over the years and like I said, my Hilux I literally had 100s of these things for every little bracket and it's really handy because this material is quite rigid, it's obviously see through, you can scratch your marks in and you can even centre punch and drill holes into it. Also note that when you're marking out polycarbonate, if you do put hole positions in things, it's quite often important, and we'll get to this in a later stage, to just mark the centre position and not actually drill out the entire size of the hole that you need because this stuff can be difficult to drill larger size holes.

It tends to wander a little and if you don't sandwich it between something, it can actually pick up in the twist drill and tear a pretty large hole in it and then from that point on it'll be useless but it's really good stuff and like I said it is a little bit expensive but I find it the ultimate material to be using any templating in motorsport and also for motorcycle fabrication and bits and pieces like that. This is actually the same part that we used for the S15 to fill in the power brace that we added on that car out of chromoly. So as you can see here, these were the points where I added the dimple dies and it's really good if you use a permanent marker you can put everything, all the details on these and keep them for future reference. So unlike paper and cardboard, polycarbonate will last forever and it can be used multiple times without wearing the edges or damaging the shape. It's great to hold onto these templates and have a bunch kept in a drawer of your toolbox should you ever need to remake something again.

And just on that, a couple of years ago at Summarnats, I was driving my HIlux and I actually ended up hitting a barrier and I was able to come back home, search through all of my polycarbonate templates, find all the tabs that I used to mount the front end and quickly remount the guards with those new sheet metal brackets. I could have reused the old ones but I didn't and it was really handy just having those templates lying around so that I could remake the parts. So that's all of the materials that we use for templating in motorsport and I would suggest giving them all a try because they all have their applications. Paper is ideal for small intricate quick jobs which I showed you, where a dirty finger can trace out your hole position. Cardboard can be very handy in larger holes that need templating and I would probably use cardboard a lot if I was making a new transmission tunnel or something of that nature.

But you cannot beat polycarbonate for the results that I spoke about before. It's expensive but it's a great material that allows you to really see what you're marking out. So those are our template materials and now we can move onto the tools that allow us to transfer our measurements onto the material to generate our template. Funnily enough, a ruler is a template for a straight line and the added measurements on the face of it allows us to get our length right. Rules come in plastic, timber and steel and I like to have a selection of rules that range from 1 m all the way down to 150 mm.

So as you can see here, I'm pretty much always keeping my 150 mm rule in my top pocket of my apron and it's brilliant to obviously have on hand with you all the time and double check measurements. Here I've got a 600 mm rule and then a 300 mm as well which are pretty much my most used items for marking out. So to mark out these measurements, we have a range of different markers and I like to use permanent markers and prefer those with a fine tip. So as you probably all know, the Sharpie brand of marker is probably my go to. I use the fine point Sharpie marker and find that it's perfect for templates.

You can use these on cardboard, paper and polycarbonate and by using these on polycarbonate, they'll obviously last a long time and you won't be rubbing that mark off with your fingers any time soon. A scriber comes in handy when making templates and is especially useful with polycarbonate as we can mark back very fine holes and lines by scratching the sharp tip of the scriber against the polycarbonate. I've got one here and this is a double ended scriber. So one end has the 90° tip on it and I find this really good for getting into hole positions and being able to get a nice scratch mark on that. Obviously when we're making our templates, a lot of what we're doing is marking back holes that are obviously the outside diameter of the hole and to then reference that back and then drill a new hole on a new piece of sheet metal, we'll have to find the centre of it.

So a scriber can be really good to get in and mark the outside diameter and then one thing that we can use to perfect our circles on our templates is a compass. For anything round, a compass will come in handy to get your circles and diameters just right and when you're using a compass, you can combine this with a ruler to get your diameter. And what I mean about that is basically using your compass, and this has a grey lead in one end and a sharp point in the other. You can swap these out and running a sharp point in both, especially for templating it's quite good, these can scratch into polycarbonate really easily. But to reference the diameter of parts then a lot of these rulers and especially the 300 and the 600 and the 1 m rules, have these little indents on 0.5 mm increments.

so when you're using something like this, I usually like to start at the 100 point and then open up my compass, say if we're looking to produce 100 mm hole. Then our radius is 50 mm so I'll usually open this up until both points fit perfectly in the 100 and 150 and that will give me a perfect 100 mm circle that I can then mark back onto my template and create that out of my polycarbonate, paper or cardboard. So the ease of template production comes down to one factor, how sharp are your scissors? I use a set of these Sidchrome industrial scissors and they are great with cardboard and paper but a little light for polycarbonate. Here, you can use the tin snips. So I've just got a set of tin snips and obviously paper, polycarbonate and bits and pieces like that require really sharp scissors and it's not beneficial to be able to use these on anything other than that.

If you've got a set of tin snips that you're using on tin then they can get to a point where they're blunt enough to not work properly on polycarbonate and I recommend always having a set that are in really good condition and that you can use for templating and they're dedicated to that process so always keep a set around, hide them so that no one else can use them and if you get them out of the bottom drawer then they're going to be perfect for cutting template materials. But a good set of scissors are always going to come in handy and for a lot of the polycarbonate that I use, these are great but they can give you a fair amount of pressure on your fingers as you're pulling that through that 1 mm or 0.8 mm polycarbonate. One of the many things that I love about that polycarbonate is the ability to drill holes. Although we can drill larger holes, I like to only drill my centre holes using a small 3 mm or 1/8th drill so that I can mark this back onto my steel or aluminium and have a very accurate centre point to drill my hole. So obviously a small drill in a cordless drill is going to come in really hand for that.

So if we're working with a template and we want to mark the positions for our dimple died holes then it's really important just to drill a small hole in the centre of these, you can use your protractor and mark the outside to make sure that you've got enough clearance for the dimple die but by just drilling a 3 mm hole in these, then this drill will go straight through this stuff no problems at all but like I said before, if you're using larger drills then it can be problematic. I do recommend if you do have to drill a large hole in this material, you use a step drill or a hole saw or you even punch them through with a material punch. So drilling can be a really handy way to putting all of that extra information into your template and even if you do wear off your marks then obviously those hole positions are going to be there for good. So as this is only a soft plastic it is great to use a previously worn drill, like I said before, along with a light amount of pressure for the purpose of making a hole. So if you've got a brand new drill set that it's always good to grab something that isn't so new because the blunter the drill, the easier time it's going to have going through the plastic without punching through and tearing it.

You can also use a heat gun that can be necessary for those who live in colder climates to assist in getting some shape into the polycarbonate. This is handy for corner radiuses where your part may be difficult to set up against the section that you're trying to mark back onto. So we've got one here that I've just completed for our roll cage. We went through the templating process in this course. And to bend the radius, it's obviously quite difficult to have this sit in the rollcage and work out if this template is perfect or not.

So what I've done is I've just got the heat gun and ran a light amount of heat in this area to get the profile of the gusset right. This can then be flattened out later and then marked back onto your sheet metal but it is really handy and it's something that if you are living in colder climates, and your garage or your workshop is quite cold then this stuff can be pretty difficult to shape so a heat gun can really come in handy if you're trying to set this up against a curved area in your vehicle. Speaking of bending, if you're looking for a sharp bend, then a vice attachment known as a vice break can come in really handy. A sheet metal folder will also work here if you have one. Just be cautious as this polycarbonate springs back a lot more than steel so you will need to overbend it quite a lot.

So a press break or a vice break is something that looks like this. So this is an attachment with some magnets on it that can clip straight into your vice. These are available in different widths and basically it allows you to put the polycarbonate template in this area and then obviously tighten it up and because this is only set at 90°, then you're probably only going to get a 45° bend out of that material but once you have that sharp break line then you're able to really put some pressure on it and allow it to bend a little more. And again if we bend it with some precision there then we can also then flatten it back out and it can also be normal to cut your template into a few parts and actually stick it together with tape so that we have some corners that fold over and create a box which can be really handy for producing something like a battery box in a vehicle that you want to add some dimple dies into, we can plan this out with polycarbonate or cardboard and then get it all folded up and make sure that it all fits before we transfer it onto the material. So once we have some shape into the template, it can be handy to use the magnets to assist in holding our part when it comes to marking back onto the steel.

So the last thing that we want is for our template material to move around halfway through the marking process and if we add a strong magnet onto it and here we have a little V block magnet, this is set at 90° again but it's really handy to sit your template onto the part and as long as it's a ferrous steel then our magnet can secure it there and that will assist with the part not moving around. It's also normal if we're templating something with a series of holes in it and you're using polycarbonate, it can be really handy to mark out your first hole and then if it's tapped like it is in this case, then you can drill that hole into your template and then screw it down onto the part and then mark out the rest. This will allow it to be nice and strong and give you the freedom to mark back the holes as you wish. You can then mark the perimeter and cut that out and it will sit perfect. So with the tools and materials now understood, we can use these to produce a small template that will be used for a shifter brace that swings off the back of a sequential gearbox.

So with all of that talk about polycarbonate, and I just want to show you one more thing before we go too much further. Although this stuff is expensive, I'm not sure whether you can see this properly, it's probably a good one to hold up like this. This is the window in my Hilux so I produced this out of 0.8 mm polycarbonate to make sure that I had all of my hole positions, they would all go into the window frame and I've kept this for use so that if I ever need a windscreen or if any of your operate racecars then you will know that the actual windows get quite scratched when they're made out of polycarbonate so it's always good to keep a template so that you can then replace those windows quite easily after a few years of use. So we've got some template material here, and I just wanted to give you a quick demonstration as to how easy it can be and what sort of features we can then put on our parts. I spoke about the S15 Silvia before and this is something that we templated, these are the floor boxes for the roll cage.

So basically what we have here is the 3 components that created these and then obviously these floor boxes are quite difficult to build because we're having to make them fit the stock chassis and floor pans in vehicles are quite difficult to get a really good fit on and it's especially important if you're TIG welding, you want to have a really good fit on your part. And by creating templates for this it means that we obviously don't have to get in and out of the car all the time and be grinding our part, we can create our template, make that fit perfectly, transfer that back onto our steel and then be able to produce the part, the right time every time basically. 100% of the time, 100% of the time so we have our 3 templates here that created this part, they've been transferred back onto the 3 mm steel and cut out. So those are some applications that I've used templating for and here we're going to do a quick demonstration to make a brace for this shifter mount. So I've got my 0.8 mm template material and first we need to line it up and it's always important to use the side of any material so we don't create too much wasteage.

It's also good to see if you've got any offcuts that you can use for this process. And I'm going to make this pretty quick and painless because you're obviously probably not going to be able to see it too well because it's clear. So what we've got here is I've just lined up the side mark of our 0.8 mm material onto the side here and because it's see-through, we're able to get a really good view on our part and not have to do any markings from the backside. So if I mark my lower face here. The upper face will run from, and if this was steel then we'd be able to put a magnet on it which would make life a lot easier.

That lower face will run from here to here and then around the corner here to here. And then this is just for the purpose of marking back our material. Obviously a ruler comes in really handy to mark these back. We just want to run from our lines down and then remember we can perfect this once it's on the part so if there's any features that need to be filed of if there's anything that doesn't fit quite right then it's always important to get it right before transferring anything onto the sheet metal. And because it's nice and rigid it will give you the option to do that.

So now that this is cut out, we'll have a go with the scissors first. Just want to line up our marks and cut through. Because it's quite rigid it can try and twist the scissors which will make you cut a little over the line but if we put a little pressure on it and try and resist that, then it will allow us to get a good cut which will be nice and clean which should fit our part. Then our final cut along the baseline here. Now this might seem like pretty simple work but it is super beneficial to put some time and effort into this and to get it right the first time.

So what you'll see here is we've got the basis of our part sorted, we just need to do some features on the back side here. So we have almost zero gap around there. I want to run around here. Mark that back. And a ruler is a great tool for creating our templates and doing many things around the fabrication workshop.

Again using our industrial scissors that we don't use on anything else, we just keep these for templating, that'll come in really handy when it comes time to needing a nice sharp pair of scissors. So this is a pretty simple template that would allow us to fill in this section of gearbox mount. We can then put some features in here, mark our hole positions if we wanted to add some dimple dies or something into here and if we needed to mount anything on there, then we could create some holes and likewise for that. And obviously because it's clear, we don't have to work from the back side of it, we can work from the front side and this is really handy when you've got a part that is completely filled in and you can't actually see behind. So by using the clear template and the clear polycarbonate material it will save you a lot of time and make the whole process a lot quicker.

So I'll just demonstrate some hole positons now in this material and it's a little bit difficult 'cause it's clear. What I might try and do is put it on, there we go put it on some cardboard, you can see it a little better. So if we were to put a hole in the centre of this, we'd mark back from corner to corner with our Sharpie pen. Again on the opposite side. This was for the purpose of losing some weight.

We could also put a couple of holes up the top here to mark our centrelines. Evenly in from the edge, say 20 mm in, 20 mm in and then the process of drilling a hole. In this material, again using a 3 mm drill, is basically not creating too much pressure on here and just popping a small hole through. You can see that there and then that will allow us to have a nice mark on our part as we trace it back onto our material. All 3 hole positions.

Just running that drill on slow speed so it doesn't wander too much but there we have a quick template that would be for the purpose of filling in that gearbox mount and something that you'll be doing all of the time. Even if it's for a roll cage you could make your gussets and double check that your template for your gussets suit. Obviously in a roll cage application you're going to be making many of these so keeping this template on hand is going to be really handy when it comes time to creating that part. Obviously the angle is going to change. But to produce that I've just laid out a small paper template that I did some quick mathematics on and then transferred the paper back onto the polycarbonate so that it then gave me a rigid part that I could then transfer onto the roll cage because again the paper isn't going to give me the strength or the rigidity so that it won't show what the steel is actually going to do.

So that's how we make a 1D template. And of course in motorsports not everything is 1D so with that quick demonstration out of the way, I wanted to introduce you to some other templates that you may have heard about. These relate to round parts and can be generated from a free website called blocklayer.com. In our previous webinar on tube notching, we went through the tube notching template method that can be a really handy computer generated PDF that's printed out and wrapped around our tube but there are others. Before we move to those others I just want to show you this template.

So this is a tube notching template and this is available at blocklayer.com which is completely free and what you can do there is input your tube diameter, your parent tube diameter, or the tube that you're fitting up against, your cut diameter and then also your angle and this will work out the cope or the mitre or the notch that needs to be put onto the tube. We can then tape this template around our tube and mark out our notch. Like I said, we went into great detail in our tube notching course but another one that I want to show you is the tube reducer template. And this can be a really handy one for making exhausts and intake systems and if you have a sheet metal roller these can make parts a simple fabrication process. So I just want to take you through the process of how we would go about that on the laptop here.

So I've got my blocklayer.com site up and running and as you can see up the top here we have printable templates. So here you'll see the pipe notching template which I just showed you and further down we have the cone pattern template. So here we have a regular cone or a reducer and this will actually input the figures that you need for the small diameter at the start of the cone and then the exit diameter at the outer. And then it'll also give you an option for the length of that. Now I've got one sitting over here which I'll just grab.

So these are pretty common in motorsport exhaust fabrication and you'll see a reducer can be something as simple as this and this is actually a rolled and welded version as well. But we use these all the time and sometimes off the shelf parts aren't available for the specific diameter and length of these so if we're working out an exhaust that doesn't use something that's off the shelf, then we can use this blocklayer.com to produce a template so I've just gone through this process previous and printed one out. So once you print out this template, this is specifically for a 1.75 tube that exits into a 3 inch tube and it is 4 inches long. So basically once you print this out, just make sure that the ratio on your printer is 100%. You can then create this template and then cut it out with your scissors and hopefully they're nice and sharp like mine are 'cause I haven't used them on anything that I probably shouldn't.

So then we just cut around this template and again you can transfer this back onto polycarbonate if you want to keep it around the workshop but these are quick and easy to generate and once they're cut out then they give really accurate results and if you wanted to produce an exhaust or produce something like a coolant overflow bottle with tapered ends then this can be a really handy way of doing it. So once we get the perimeter cut out, and remember this is a 3 inch outlet and 1.75 inlet. Once we get the perimeter cut out we can then either transfer that back onto our material and then work out our bend radius. So once it's looped around and joined together, that will create our, and I'll put some tape on that so that we can get a better representation of what that will look like once it's transferrred onto the steel. And that one, the complete one that I showed you is actually made out of titanium and obviously different metals will require different bending operations and some are harder than others but obviously if you were to make a radiator header tank or something like that and wanted a cone on it then this can be a pretty easy way to make that out of aluminium.

So there we have it, a 1.75 inlet into a 3 inch outlet with a length of 4 inches. So there are mathematical equations that you can work these out with but obviously most of us won't have time and if we just use the blocklayer.com website to produce these then they can come quite and easy and we can adjust our dimensions to give us different sized cones and this works really well. And it's another part of templating that I guess probably a lot of people don't really think too much about. Alright so that about sums up the templating process. And before I get to the questions I will just go over a few things that we have covered.

So all of these template materials have their place in motorsport and it's up to you to try these out and find what works in your situation. The polycarbonate templates have really allowed me to flex some creativity in the fabrication process and they've eliminated a lot of waste through getting things right the first time. This decreases the mess, decreases the amount of grinding wheels that you'll use and it will speed up the process of making multiple items. In the past, I've added additional information onto the polycarbonate templates and dropped it off at my local laser cutting shop where they can scan and send these laser parts out for me for either laser cutting or aluminium or water jet cutting out of aluminium. So as a motorsport fabricator we need to be constantly thinking about how we can make things serviceable.

And if we have a catalogue of templates to replicate our work then remaking something requires a lot less effort than if we didn't. Alright I'll get to some questions now but I want to thank everyone for taking the time out of their day for this webinar. Again, templating is an important process and it's something that I think you will have a lot of input into once you start making these, you'll get to understand the process, you'll get to really find what works for you and in my situation I really liked the polycarbonate template but you don't have to, you can use paper or cardboard. Cardboard is available non core fluted which is a lot easier to use. I'm just checking for some questions, we don't have any rolling in at this time so it's a quick and easy one today but I hope you've enjoyed this template webinar and thanks for choosing ETS Fab.