Who here likes and is good at hammer & dolly? Back in high school I started working in a body shop with this old guy that looked like he was 80 then. Of course being 15 made everybody over thirty look old, but this guy looked
old. Al Sievers was his name. Al
hated plastic body fillers. If you even mentioned fillers you were then treated to a pissed off irritated Al for the rest of the day. I used to think he was a big pain in the a$$. Al would sit on his stool with his two hammers, about ten different dollies and his torch and spend days hammering and shrinking hammering and shrinking. One of my other friends worked at a shop that was high volume insurance work and when we would talk he was doing so much more cool stuff than I was doing. Teaching him how to pull frames and replace quarters and I would go to work and think Man, this sucks! Al would have me doing the same thing except I was only beating on the old junk he had that were his projects. Day in and day out hammer and shrink.
After two years I decided I'd had enough of this. So I got a job in a different shop and I was all excited. I was going to learn everything! Boy was I wrong. This guy was such a crook. He had me riveting on metal right over the damaged areas and hiding the rivets behind trim and underneath. After I'd been there for about 6 months, a guy brought in a 240Z and Ohren (german guy) gives the job to me. I thought wow this is going to be so cool working on this. It wasn't real bad, a light impact that only pushed the fender in a little bit. So I grab my hammers and dollies and I start going to town on this thing. All of a sudden I'm thinking "Hey this hammer and dolly thing isn't so bad". Ohren blew his top. He is screaming at me asking what kind of a fool do I think he is, on and on. I'm starting to get pretty pissed off because he is getting way out of line. Finally I lose it and tell him to F.O.
I moved on to another shop and thought I had hit the jackpot. We had five bays and we were doing some work. This was the first place I ever worked that had a real paint booth. Wow! But man this place was high volume ins. work. Bust em out as fast as you can. Quality was not top priority. If you had to change a quarter you mowed that thing off of there with air nibblers, flanged it, trimmed the new one, punched it and welded her on. A good helping of filler, the air file, a little DA and she was ready for prime and paint. About a year of that and I found myself missing ole crotchety Al.
I went to see if I could come back to work for him, but of course he had another kid working there and Al definitely didn't have the volume to justify me also. That was the end to my working in body shops. I still worked on mine and friends but never as a career.
Over the years I have grown to really love hammer & dolly work. It's almost therapeutic, and with anything you do for that long, I've gotten pretty darn good at it. Still have never replaced a quarter the correct way.
but I can work metal with the best of em. My stud gun only comes out when I
cannot get to the inside.
So was just wondering who else here has a sick passion for hammer & dolly?
