russau - Yes, the sign material is a bugger to bend. I have a small steel table, comparable in thickness to the plates they use to cover work on streets, which I clamp the piece down to. I use the table's edge as the guide and then try to bend by hand with pressure from my 250(+) pound carcass. After making minimal headway, and wearing ear protection, I begin beating the hell out of it with a sledge until it slowly bends to the table's edge.
The sign material is brittle and will break if not careful, but you can't beat the price of material. And I'm so cheap I use plastic air filter mesh material instead of 3M Nomad miners moss because it gets thrown away at the local furnace shop. They chuck a lot of it because customers switch to hepa filters when they install a new furnace, so the original new stuff gets tossed. I also used the brake at the furnace shop to bend the steel flat stock I used to make my 16ft, 5 section, long tom. I just measured and marked all the pieces and asked if they'd help me bend it. It was about ten times cheaper than having the metal shop where I buy screen and flat stock bend it.
The way I figure, there's no sense spending more money on equipment than I'll ever reap in gold recovery, and if it's big enough to see, chances are most anything is good enough to catch it, from poop tube to corrugated roofing, to welcome mats, to tree bark. A picker's gunna drop and wait for you regardless of how fancy you wanna get. I'm just waiting for that bigun to roll back off the grizzly and smack my toe. That'll be a fun day.
Now if I can just figure how to catch the flour dust. In the mean time I just keep saving my black sands in jar after jar. Love to have one of those green shaker tables the old man used on the Alaska Gold series. Couldn't stand the show, but loved to see the equipment. Though I did route for the kid and his grandpa.
Dry--classify to 50 minus---buy a blue bowl and get the job done-ez 2 do. I do mine every winter when too cold to mine and then making $$$$ all the time-tons a au 2 u 2-John