Hi guys,
Tuck shrinking is the current fave over here, mostly because of the teeny-weeny types of projects I tend to work on most of the time. I actually have a pretty nice Maple stump I made a couple of years ago, but it hasn't seen much use outside of the regional meets I have over here, as I simply can't use it to place a tuck the exact size in exactly the right place on the small parts I'm usually working on (car fenders and ball caps are very different critters I've discovered!). I am thinking of making up a set of scale replica 34 Ford roadster body panels for my ridem' lawnmower though, so maybe a larger project like that will be a good time to work on my stump shrinking technique.
Tuck shrinking is definitely hard work, but developing your hammering technique goes a long way for getting your moneys worth out of your efforts. I expend about a quarter of the effort I used to when I first started, and I'm doing it with a hammer that weighs half as much as the ones I started with. The little aluminum hammer on the right is the one I use to pound down tucks all the time now, including when I work with 18 guage CRS! I can pound tucks all afternoon with that hammer, and still have an arm left at the end of the day to wheel out the tucks I made in my english wheel.
The only difference nowadays is the wedge shaped UHMW tucking head, which I have changed out to a dome shape, because they take longer to hack up and they tend to be easier on the 3003 aluminum.
As far as the direction of approach to hammer down a tuck goes (inside to outside or vice versa), I tend to be pretty flexible about that depending on the available access. When I was hammering down tucks inside the neck of the spiral vase, I was lucky to get a hammer in there in the first place, so the restricted access forced me to take them any way I could get at them on an individual basis. This comes up a fair bit around here, so every new small project is a new learning experience.
All that said, I plan on replacing myself with a machine for this task pretty soon! A reciprocating hammer with a set of shrinking dies sounds pretty cool after manually pounding down a million or so tucks, so I can see one of those in my workshop before too long.
Ken