[John Buchtenkirch]

I had a Magee at one time and after I realized how tooling intensive it was I let it go. A really neat machine but a production machine non the less and I never had any dreams doing runs of wire edged parts. I believe Kent’s John Deere acquaintance could be right on the money timewise for setups. You have to understand he is talking about production work where they don’t want any marking on the metal…….. ideally the parts should be able go straight to paint without any additional metal finishing after being wired. Heck, even a change in metal gauge could require opening up (machining) rolls if you are after that degree of repeatable perfection. On the other hand if we as metal shapers could get a fender wired in under 10 minutes in a Magee machine but had to do say 15 minutes of hand work to make it right, well I think we’d still be pretty happy depending on the final results. That’s my take on it. ~ John Buchtenkirch

P.S. The above kinda reminds me of someone posting “Reverse curves are easy” which was posted well over 10 years ago on another group. The poster had a photo showing the reverse curved panel he had made but it didn’t really have to fit anything in particular. I had to bite my tongue on that one.