Monday, April 14, 2008

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!



2 comments:

Carlos said...

Great buildup! I will be watching for updates! Are you on e30tech or r3vlimited?

Anonymous said...

Wow, man. That is some really great workmanship.

I have one suggestion with your front fenders, it would be to leave the rear section flared open (like u see on the JGTC, and WTCC cars) this would reduce the drag created in the rear of the fender, another solution could be to make gills in the fender, should achieve a similar result.

I looks forward to checking up on your progress, and if I ever move stateside, I'm coming to hound you to make me some carbon parts :P