Interesting techniques, in many ways it seems 180 from what Ron Covell preaches (hammer off dolly). Can't argue with results.

 

i had trouble putting one on that was already made thats some talent

 

All I can say is....WOW!

 

A true artist !! I am impressed & I usaully only do that to myself .

 

I hate the computer system here at work, I really want to see this video!

 

The fact is, that isn't that difficult to do. The major stumbling block I'd have is not having a large english wheel to roll in the large shallow crown. I know how to do that. I just don't have the equipment. It could be done by hand but it would take forever. The rest of the shaping I could do, it's just a matter of understanding what the metal does when it is worked, stretching and shrinking, then breaking the shapes down into their basic parts. You also need a lot of patience. Most people want instant gratification so they start beating away haphazardly and the shape gets away from them. A lot of controlled light taps will do a lot more than a couple heavy hits. The metal needs to be lightly persuaded into the form you want, not beat into submission! Think about shaping a ball of pizza dough into a crust. If you push it gently with your finger tips many times, it will stretch out and lay down, thinning out evenly and taking on the shape of the pizza pan. However if you just start whaling away on the ball of dough with your fist, you will just end up with a lumpy misshapened mess.

Ross, I didn't see where they did things significantly differently from Ron, it just depends on the results your want to achieve. Ron uses a lot of off dolly work when straightening out dented metal, on dolly when the metal needs to be stretched. You might also use off dolly where you wanted to bend over an edge. Sometimes what is actually off dolly shaping of a small area may look like on dolly work, say smoothing out the common bag of walnuts formed when stretching into a shotbag or depression in a stump or in planishing but you stop hammering as soon as the metal has touched the dolly so you don't stretch it further. On dolly hammer stretching is commonly used when hammer welding to reverse the heat shrinkage along a weld seam.
The big problem I see with that video is they obviously can do the shaping, but I got no sense of if they can actually teach us how to do it. I would have liked to have seen a small amount of actual instruction rather than just keep telling us it can be done before I would spend that much money for the DVDs. There was very little actual shaping being done in that clip, and no explanation of what was happening when it was.