#5 Welding, Sheet Metal Work, and Other Challenges Outside Daily Routines: Part 2

At this point, Tsuchiya and his crew had two challenging assignments. The first was to produce the panels, larger than any they had experienced before, by "hand-beating" sheet metal, just as it was done in the days of the original Toyopet Racer.

A time-honored craft, this technique involves manually pounding sheet metal into the desired shape with a hammer instead of using a press or similar equipment. Over his career, Yoshino has had experience fabricating large parts entirely by hand when building prototypes or concept cars. However, these days such jobs have all but disappeared.

Neither the young technicians who handled most of the sheet metal work-including Tetsuya Kondo, Kenji Naito, Yoshiki Horikawa, and Yasuo Yamada-nor their instructor Tsuchiya had experience with hand-beating parts as large as the Toyopet Racer's body panels. Yoshino hoped to pass on the skills to a new generation by entrusting this work to the team's younger members.

The second challenge was to complete the body panels without putty, using only welding and polishing to create a beautifully smooth finish.