Great, thanks for all the replies. I am planning on trying this in the summer to finish up some interior and trunk parts.

I would say that unless you have 2 people working it, you will never get that nice quality of work with a manual bead roller. I would presume that most high level bead roller work like that is done on a nice high end electric bead roller.

Check out some "using a bead roller" videos on you tube. I have a cheap bead roller like that and it has its place, but you can't expect that top level professional work out of it. I made my own cheesy tipping die out of a big washer since I couldn't find one to fit those eastwood rollers. It was kind of crude but man it really did work for tipping edges into curves.

Check out what this guy, Jamey Jordan can do with the bead roller.

http://greaseralley.com/2011/09/30/j...dmade-seat-co/


He is also on Facebook.

Thats amazing. I'd like to actually see him in action. Makes you want to build a rod around those seats!

The last time I was at Ganassi I had noticed the fab guys had made their own step dies from nylon round stock, for doing their raised panel work, which made it possible to maneuver the panel and not get any die marks at all when doing curves, no stop/start marks, etc.

The way it was explained to me was that they could get real nice results and had a measure of "control", because of the "slip" of the rollers...the working of the metal could be carefully managed/controlled as the material was being fed into the rollers. This was on a motorized bead roller.

http://inlinethumb54.webshots.com/46...600x600Q85.jpg