Mudguards
About 6 or 7 years ago, a man called Alan Davis, from Poole, made a batch of front and rear Rudge Ulster mudguards. I was lucky enough to buy a pair, for £230 (which looking back now is amazingly cheap), so my Ulster "restoration" (which started in 1974 when someone gave me a cylinder head, but stalled for lack of mudguards), revived and was finished. I've just spoken to him, and unfortunately it's an experience he wouldn't wish to repeat, but he told me how he did it, and that he thought it would be much easier with ally than it was with steel. When he finished the batch his tooling was beyond further use.
The curve was made by passing the strip repeatedly through three pairs of formers, concave on the outside of each pair, convex on the inside, ending up with the right profile and the right curve. On the Ulster guards he then formed the bead by bending it over first to five degrees (an inch at a time by means of a saw-cut in the end of a piece of flat bar) then 10, 15 up to 90, then hammered it over. He said "it was tedious". Hmmm.
My competence as a sheet metal worker extends little further than operating a tin-opener without cutting myself very often, so this explanation may lack some critical detail...
What he did remark was that the formers had cost him a lot of time and effort to make, but with CNC machines they might nowadays be a great deal easier and perhaps cheaper to make. Since machines to make mudguards exist (is it auto-restorations who have one?) then presumably the easiest way to go about it would be to "make our own formers" to suit machinery that belongs to someone else.