No, I don’t charging up and down on a horse with a lance and trying to kill someone. In contrast, I mean making lists of things to do over the winter, many of which won’t actually get done. This year, though, things are a little different in that I’ve (well, really we’ve decided) to stop full time work at the end of the year. Whether this translates immediately into no work, or just part time work is anyone’s guess. For now, though, I studiously avoiding the R word, because that’s something that old people do.
In the meantime I do have a big list of things to do. Many of them are kind of optional but some are essential in particular getting rid of the worst excrescences that mar the current bodywork. Chief amongst these are the proboscis that covers up the front ARB and the truly hideous engine cover, as seen above. This has served its role, which was just to cover up the hole and get me out. However, it’s horrible.
So, the time had come and I dug out the buck that I’d started to make for this when I was doing the main bodywork buck. As you can probably say it’s made out of lots of bits of foam, hot-glued together and sporting a hat made from the inevitably 3mm MDF.
I did think about re-doing this but as it’s pretty much the shape I wanted and already fitted (that baseboard actually fits in the recess in the rear bodywork) I decided that I might as well press on with it.
First job then was to turn this into decent buck so I started off by icing it, it is nearly the time of year for Christmas cakes after all, using body filler. This at least had the advantage of holding the whole thing together, so that I could attach the baseboard to a lump of 18mm MDF to make it more manageable.
After that I set about it with various implements of destruction, and much more filler making a lot of dust and slowly getting towards the shape I wanted. To be honest, I’d forgotten how soul-destroying this process is. That we’d managed to do this for the complete bodywork a year ago is only to be marvelled at. I can’t imagine how I found the energy. Perhaps that’s why the notion of stopping work now seems so attractive?
This photo shows the buck getting on towards the end of the process. As you can tell it’s getting to look a little less like a pile of bits of foam glued together.
Once this process was done I used, as before, the Easy Composites pattern making process and added the undercoat which was much rubbed down and finally the gloss coat which left it looking like this. Note that it’s actually got a shine on it. I know that you can see some spots where the base pattern coat has been worn through but they do have a layer of the gloss coat on the top of them. That is, it’s all over shiny.
With that it was time to make the moulds. I must admit that at this point I was kind of losing the will to live. Making bucks and moulds is really tedious.
I’d worked out that I probably needed to make a three part mould so I made some fences using Correx (that signboard that estate agents use) and started laying up moulds again using the Easy Composites Unimould system. This uses a vinyl ester gelcoat which is supposedly compatible with epoxy as well as polyester resin. The problem is it stinks to high heaven which doesn’t work well for domestic harmony. Again, though, I did a whole car with this stuff a while ago.
Note the little pips on the fences, by the way. This is a technique introduced on one of the Easy Composites training videos and helps to produce moulds that lock together nicely. It’s a pit they didn’t produce that video before we made the main bodywork moulds…
Finally, I finished the moulds and separated them from the buck. I nearly came unstuck at that point as the mould release didn’t work quite right and I ended up having to forcibly remove, with the aid of a lot of abrasives, some bits of the buck from the moulds. I obviously needed even more mould release.
The mould, when finished, though looked pretty good and looked as though the flash lines would be rather smaller than they are on the main bodywork, which is nice.
This photo is of the completed mould, although it’s obviously upside down. The reason it looks a bit grubby is that in fact it’s been used once. This is because the end goal is, again, to use resin infusion to make a carbon part it seemed sensible to take an initial moulding off made from simple hand laid up polyester/chopped strand glass. That at least means that I can take this part off the critical path on the list.
So, finally, here’s the new part sitting on the car. It’s not actually held down yet as I need to trim the base slightly.
The next problem, though, is that there’s now no obvious way for air to get into the engine. That’s going to have to be the next job. I’m probably going to have to make some sort of scoop that faces forwards, meaning more moulding. Oh good…