[Joe Swamp]

I'm not sure that you can -- you need to tape the FSP over a shape in order to capture it, and you also need to make the profile gauges. When I took Wray's class we made 1920s fenders for a car where the originals had been lost, and we used a fender buck sculpted out of wire mesh/foam/bondo. Of course once you had the FSP and gauges you theoretically wouldn't need the buck anymore. Only one buck had to be made because the FSPs could be flipped inside out.

Remember that the FSP only captures half of the information: the shrinking/stretching changes in the sheet metal. The profile gauges are just as important as they tell you how the metal must be bent.

One of the judgement calls an expert metalshaper makes is knowing when to bend the metal vs knowing when to shrink/stretch the metal to make it fit the buck. The nice thing about the FSP is that it solves this problem -- once the FSP fits, then only bending is required to make the piece fit.