Hi Mark. Yes! I'm willing to share the "corners" I got myself into and hope you and others can help guide me out of them. I'm a big admirer of your Daytona project and mention you often to people who ask me if car bodies can be build with a minimum of tooling. You focus on getting panels built rather than building a tool collection.
Okay, here's the story: I began the first panel yesterday by first making a Flexible Shape Pattern and then shaping the .063 alum. to it. The blue tape lines show my proposed panel join lines.
I like the Ron Fournier (and others) technique of blocking out the panel with a blocking hammer and then smoothing it on the English wheel. I did some rapid shrinking of the front edge on my Mechammer. In a few minutes had the basic shape.
A couple of things surprised me, however. Firstly, although I measured from blue line to blue line and allowed a 1/2" border all around, the panel itself barely reached each blue line as I laid it on the buck. I used a tipping die on my bead roller to bring over the front edge flange, but the curve of the panel is so acute that the panel edge hit the bead roller frame after about 80% around the part, and so I had to use a hammer and dolly to rough in the last 20% of the flange. I did not get that crisp enough, but would have done had I not then realized another problem.
The nose buck does not "fair" properly into the subsequent buck stations. I believe this is because the nose was made last summer, and in the intervening 9 months as I tweaked the buck, I lost the original line. Upon finding out that I had to re-fair the buck, I learned that I must not shape just to the buck, but consider the next few stations.
Because of that, I English wheeled intensively the very top of the panel so that it would fair into the next station, but as I did that, I got too much shape into the "2 o'clock" position (if looking straight on) of the panel and it has a bubble. From the "2 o'clock" position on down the buck shape is actually quite complex. It flattens out near the back edge, but folds inwards and around at the front. Trying to get that front edge to hug the buck proved nearly impossible despite the various shrinking methods I employed.
MY CONCLUSION IS THIS: (Comments welcome) I believe that there is too much going on in this shape for it to be made by someone with my limited skill set. I think I should break the panel into two pieces. 1) The 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock piece, and 2) The 2 o'clock down to the bottom side piece.
I also learned to be gentle with this foam and Bondo buck. I did some slapping with my spring steel (old Austin-Healey Sprite leaf spring) slapper, and got some cracks in the buck.
I learned a lot from this first attempt, and am eager to get back to work on it tomorrow. COMMENTS WELCOME!
