Surplus stores or airport sheetmetal shops are good places to look for sheet aluminum ... See All 19 Photos The final shape is arrived at by using a simple hand file. Always work over a rug ...

Cutting fluids can be used with twist drills, but are generally not needed for thinner gauge sheet metal. You may want to have a bottle on hand for when drilling through thicker sheets or steel.

With a combination of these manipulations, you can create anything from flat sheet, and you can do it by hand. To get a primer on basic metal shaping, we headed over to Walden Speed in Pomona ...

The average hack requires at least one angled metal part ... do the math by hand. Let’s start by assuming you wanted to build a 90° bracket out of an infinitesimally thin sheet of material ...