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Bending a backing plate

So my plan called for a curve in the headstock, the trunk of a ukulelephant has to curve after all and mandolin tuners have a straight backing plate. How to make a straight flat backing plate bend seems impossible. Metal is malleable. If you squash it, it stretches. If it stretches in one place it bends in another. All it takes is a hammer and a flat ended punch against a bit of steel (my vice) to make it bend. Only I didn't have a real punch so the end of a bolt will do.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Fred Johnson on May 16, 2018 at 12:01am

I'm intrigued as to why you want to bend the plate!

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Permalink Reply by Titch the Clown on May 16, 2018 at 12:38am

For the next one of these

This version used two sets of 2 left 2 right small sealed tuners. I have 4 right hand ones spare now which will wait for a while till I finish a couple more ukulelephants. The advantage of the mandolin tuners is that the knobs can be flipped and the solid backing plate keeps everything nicely alligned.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Fred Johnson on May 16, 2018 at 1:48am

You're obviously intent on building a herd of these,does the plan include the mammy and daddy guitelephants?

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Permalink Reply by Timothy Hunter on May 16, 2018 at 2:40am

you could have cut the backing plate through the middle of the mounting hole then filed the inside to allow for the curve and still used the mounting holes ....

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Permalink Reply by Timothy Hunter on May 16, 2018 at 11:22pm

me too but i think he is trying to use what he already has.

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Permalink Reply by Titch the Clown on May 22, 2018 at 10:07am

And here is the final product

Next time I will be a bit more destructive in the mid plate area as suggested by Tim .

The reason I went with the mandolin tuners was fit. The posts are on 25mm centers where the tuners like Richard suggested are about 32mm long. The small sealed tuners I used on the first one are 19 mm wide but the screw tag and curve made me space them at 22mm. The other disadvantage with those is that they are unidirectional so to get a left hand set I had to use two 2L 2R sets, which gives me a spare right hand set.

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Permalink Reply by Timothy Hunter on May 22, 2018 at 10:52pm

looking good!

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Permalink Reply by Paul Craig on May 26, 2018 at 9:03am

I would just sets of 6 inline individual tuners and have 2 left over for another build. 2 sets of those tuners would cover 3 builds.

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Permalink Reply by Ken Vickerson on May 26, 2018 at 1:21pm

I would cut the plate on one side of the screw hole (3 maybe 4 cuts) with a jeweller’s saw and bend the assembly. You are correct in stretching one side with a hammer but this will only get you so far. Best of luck fitting this on your moon buggy.