Today’s post is about shaping foam! Yay! It is exciting stuff!
As I previously mentioned way back in the beginning of this blog that I have to consciously keep my urges for perfection at arms length with this project.
Otherwise the car would never ever see the open road again. Therefore concessions need to be made, that is why I am shaping floral foam to fiberglass over to create a working part that in the end will look close enough to what a ’74 Monaco front end looks like.
Key word here is CLOSE enough.
I don’t have access to a real ’74 Monaco to take a mold of the front fenders, I don’t have access to detailed drawings with dimensions and curvatures or other big fancy words for shapes and things, nor the experience with AutoCAD or other design software to draw the pieces and export to my CNC routerfied printer thingamajiggy.
But I do have my eyes, my hands, and a sense of touch.
Oh yeah. I’m going old school!
Over the Thanksgiving weekend I made multiple trips up and down Harlem Ave. to purchase and pick up Christmas trees for the house. Long story short, pre-lit trees suck because they last for shit. SO anywho, during one of my excursions I decided to stop off at the Sears in Chicago Ridge Mall.
I know your thinking to yourself, Brian you hate stores! Why on earth would you go to the mall during Black Friday sales??? 9 times out of 10 I would tell you that you’re absolutely right, but this is Sears we’re talking about. They don’t have any customers.
So I go to the Craftsman section and as I am perusing their many different saws I found what I think would work perfectly!
A 3 in 1 set of blades for different things. One is a basic wood saw, the second is a double serrated thin blade that would totally f*** someone up in a knife fight, and finally what they call a flush blade.
The flush blade kind of looks like a mean nasty spatula. Long, wide enough to flip a burger, but surrounded by lots of little jagged edges for cutting.
The blade thin enough though to lay against flat surface to replicate contours onto the piece you are cutting.
After a few passes I have what looks like a half-way decent shape.
From there I proceeded to slowly cut out the front piece in order to trial fit the headlight bezel and do some final more shaping of the corner tip.
I fitted the bezel in, taped it into place and used a couple of different files to shape tip to get close enough to looking like a ’74 fender. I personally don’t think it looks to shabby!
One thing I did notices was that while the foam I purchased was thick enough for the top part of the fender, since there is a slight angle to the old fender it left a wee bit of a gap between the bezel and foam.
The end of the fenders should be flat, not angled. I fixed that cutting a shim piece of scrap foam and hot gluing it there. Once I trim and sand it for fiberglass and resin, you’ll never know it was there.
That sums up this weeks progress so far. When I have some free time I’ll knock out the drivers side piece. After that I am going to set these aside for the time being. Fiberglassing will be my winter winter project in the basement since I won’t be able to spend much time in the garage.
While the weather is still mild enough I am going to turn my attention to wire wheeling off all the scaling and coating all of those areas with rust encapsulating paint so the body won’t go through that again!
