Splitter fabrication, sheetmetal trimming

This weekend I finally trimmed away the sheet metal fenders to allow for more tire clearance. The trim is pretty modest for now, after the Kevlar fenders are on I'll go back and remove more material. I didn't want to remove too much and not have enough room to mount the flares.


I also began fabricating the front splitter. The construction is a composite aluminum panel...a polymer honeycomb structure skinned with aluminum. The weight is similar to .040 aluminum, but about 50 times stronger. It's pretty cool stuff, amazing strong for the weight. I did consider carbon fiber, but I was worried about destroying it on a speed bump or something. The composite aluminum is simple to duplicate and I can have a couple extra in case I break one.

The splitter isn't pinned to the bumper yet, I still have to make some supports to tie it to the chassis. If this thing actually works, it should generate about 160-200lbs of down force...so I better attach it to the frame properly. Attachment to the bumper cover alone would cause too much distortion for the surface to be effective.

Fenders are rough-trimmed and pinned!

Lots of progress over the weekend- I even cleaned out the garage and chipped some epoxy from the concrete floor...hopefully when I do one of those garage-floor painting kits it'll cover most of the spots. Anyway- the fenders are all pinned on with Cleckos so I can do my final fitting and trim. The car is starting to look pretty good, even though it's 4 different colors.

This time for the rear fenders I used Meguire's mold release paste wax on the male mold and it made a world of difference. The finished parts almost fell off the car...way easier than previous methods. I weighed a rough-trimmed rear fender...exactly 2 pounds! It's remarkably stiff too, at least when it's attached to the car. I may reinforce the backside with a little fabric here and there, in high stress locations.

I also mocked-up a belly pan undertray that will tie in with the fenders. I'm not sure what material to make the undertray out of yet...some sort of composite involving Kevlar for its abrasion resistance. Maybe with a polyurethane foam core? I guess I need to do some testing first.

Below is a Photoshop'd image to see what it might look like with some paint...not too bad so far!

Kevlar on the rears-

I made a lot of progress today, the rear fenders have a few layers of Kevlar on them and should be able to be removed from the "mold" tomorrow. The epoxy cures a lot better at 74 degrees ambient!

The front flares are mocked up using Clecko pins for now, I'll have a little sanding and filling to do before they are done. You can see the Micro in the photo below, it's a mixture of micro-glass balloons and epoxy. It's very strong and can take a beating unlike regular body filler. I still have to do the final trim of both the bumper and fender flares, the I can start removing some of the original steel fender to allow some clearance for the tires.

Rear fenders are taking shape

I finally got around to fleecing the rear fenders now that the fronts have cured and my techniques have been semi-proven. I'm planning on putting a coat of epoxy on the fleece soon, so adding Kevlar should happen this week if all goes well. The cold temperatures have really slowed the cure of my epoxy so the whole process is taking double what it should. We are supposed to have 70 degree weather this weekend, so hopefully I can make some progress.

The fronts came out nice, they only needed a little bit of micro to smooth out a few low spots from the deformed male mold (once again, the cold temp made the epoxy cure too slowly, allowing for deformation of the mold during the cure). The biggest challenge was making matching bumper extensions to match the fender flares. I should've made the whole thing as one piece then cut it to allow removal of the bumper. I believe my solution will work, but it was a lot of extra work that could've been eliminated. I am now doing the rear sections as one piece that I will cut later so I can remove the rear bumper.

Another thing I learned is to reinforce my MDF forms with an adhesive in addition to hot glue. I used heaters to cure the front flares, which melted the hot glue at 150 degrees, which deformed the mold. The rears have additional supports as well as standard adhesive that should hold up under artificial heat.

In other news-- the doors have been prepped for molding as well, I am planning on using a carbon fiber/Kevlar laminate to create some lightweight door skins. I'm just going to pin them on using Dzus fasteners, I can't think of a situation where I would need a hinged door (emergency workers can pull me through the window just as easy as if I had a normal door, since the x-brace is in the way anyway). To prep the doors I cut off all unnecessary sheetmetal and filled in the door handle area. The new skins should be about 12-16oz. each.