Mark is being too humble about his contributions to this station buck and the Miura project overall. He has been an advisor, giving me great advice and the referral to Dan Palatnik for the CAD work that was beyond my skill set. Mark has a great eye for auto body design and a very practical sense for the coach building process. The progress and results would not be the same if I were doing this without his advice. I want to publicly thank Mark for all his help so far (and encourage him to keep the good advice coming :) ).

Vent hammer forms
 

I bumped into an old friend one day and he mentioned that he'd built himself a CNC router in his garage. Hearing this, I immediately asked him for a favor, provided him the CAD files and soon I had another piece to the station buck puzzle. He made me hammer forms in MDF for the vents situated in the top middle of the hood.

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19609

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19610

These started from 3 layers of 3/4" MDF glued together and then shaped on a CNC router. Like the other parts of the station buck, these fit perfect with the top surfaces aligned as they should be. You sure can't beat this CAD stuff for accuracy.

Next up, he's making the hammer forms for the headlight openings. We're still trying to figure out how to best do the front grill opening hammer form. Given it's height is greater than the Z axis on his CNC router, it will likely need to be shaped in multiple pieces and then these pieces glued together.

Headlight opening hammer forms
 

The headlight opening hammer forms are now shaped and installed on station buck.

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19630

Next up, the front grill opening. This one is big and complicated. It might take a while to get done.

Grill Opening Hammer Form
 

The front clip station buck is now all done with the completion of the grill opening hammer form. Like I predicted, this hammer form took a lot of work and thus time to finish. It’s composed of 12 layers of ¾” MDF that are glued together to make up the form.

I want to give my friend, Michael Bonadio, a very sincere thank you for doing all the CNC work on his DIY home assembled CNC router. Given his router bed is shorter than the width of this hammer form (48” versus 63”), he had to build an indexed sled to do 2 pass cuts by shifting the piece of MDF so the router head could reach the far edge for the 2nd pass. In addition, the hammer form is taller than the Z axis so he cut each of the 12 layers individually. The longer sections took about 2 hours of CNC router time each to cut.

Prior to gluing the layers together, I cut the middle out of each layer to get rid of excess MDF and thus a lot of weight. After all the layers were glued together, I cut the grill opening area out with a reciprocating Sawsall.

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19645

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19646

I plan to do flow forming of aluminum over this hammer form so I needed to make sure all the body lines and grill edge is continuous and smooth. I used bondo to fill in some imperfections where the MDF became too thin at the edge of a layer and thus the post glued edge was not smooth. After surface filing to smooth over layers, some hand sculpting/chiseling to deepen lower vent openings, and sanding, I applied urethane varnish to waterproof and ready the surface for the flow forming.

Here is the station buck with all hammer forms in place. In spite of all the weight reduction I had done, the front hammer form is still fairly heavy. I had to add a support leg just behind it to keep the station buck from tipping forward.

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19647

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19648

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19649

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=19650

I’m really happy with the result on this hammer form. I can foresee it as a good piece of garage wall art somewhere down the road.

That came out looking fantastic!

I recently needed to get measurements for the Miura rocker panels. So I assembled the station buck module in order to get these measurements.

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=20138

It's not as exciting as the front clip buck module but contains very valuable information. For example, the rockers have a very slight outward taper of 3/8" at the upper edge from front to back. They also have a 3/8" incline at this same outer edge from front to back. I would have never known this had I not carefully measured (and re-measured) them prior to building out the sub-structures for mounting the door sills and rocker panels.

Will these very subtle details be visible to the naked eye when viewing the completed car? I've got to believe it's the small things like this that at the subconscious level do make a difference. It could even be the difference in what we perceive as a nice looking tribute car as compared to a knock-down gorgeous, beautiful work of art that might just be better than the original.

Great work Joel. It is a piece of art.

Thanks so much for sharing so much informations about the buck, its design and its fabrication. I am currently thinking about my next project when the ghia is done and it‘s helping a lot!

Cheers

Antoine

Stunning Joel.

Rear opening hammer form
 

I finally finished up the hammer form for the Miura rear opening. The Miura has a grill opening just above the roll pan that lets hot air escape from the engine compartment. This hammer form is built up from 12, 1" thick pieces of MDF that were individually shaped on a CNC router and then glued together.

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=20233

Prior to glueing, I cut out the middle portion of each layer to remove weight. This in effect makes the hammer form hollow in the middle. Then after glueing and because it was still fairly heavy, I cut out the rectangular sections from the top. I didn't think the side and bottom edges of the actual opening would be strong enough for the type of hammering I anticipate, so I reinforced them using kevlar fiber infused body filler. I plan to turn the flange in the aluminum sheet that forms the opening using a rubber hammer. Hopefully with the bondo reinforcement, it will stand up to some decent hammer blows.

After filing the exposed hammer form surfaces smooth, I used a high build primer to seal and then bright yellow Rustoleum paint to make it look decent.

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=20235

http://www.allmetalshaping.com/pictu...ictureid=20234

I think after this hammer form serves its purpose for body shaping, it might just make a great garage wall shelf.