Thickness Of Automotive Sheet Metal

Commonly used steel sheet metal ranges from 30 gauge to about 7 gauge.
Thickness of automotive sheet metal. 0299 and 24 ga. Whether you re pounding a dented body panel or fabricating an entire custom interior for a race car you re bound to work with sheetmetal in the automotive world. Sheet metal gauge size chart gauge or gage sizes are numbers that indicate the thickness of a piece of sheet metal with a higher number referring to a thinner sheet. 0239 range depending on the.
20 gauge became common in more recent times and this meant 0 0359 inch thick metal still a lot to work with in bumping and metal finishing. The reason i say this is that i have rebuilt two older vehicles a 55 chevy and a 67 el camino and have found the sheet metal to be in the 22 ga. The larger the gauge number the thinner the metal. In the u s the thickness of sheet metal is commonly specified by a traditional non linear measure known as its gauge.
In most of the world sheet metal thickness is consistently specified in millimeters. A gauge conversion chart can be used to determine the actual thickness of sheet metal in inches or millimeters. For example 18 gauge steel according to a gauge conversion chart is 0 0478 inch or 1 214 millimeter. Automotive sheet metal once ran in the range of 18 gauge which was 48 thousandths of an inch thick actually 0 0478 inch.
The gauge number 18 holds no relevance to the actual measurements. Brianstick with all due respect i find it hard to believe that sheet metal from a 1974 american made automobile has 18 ga.