Stoneleigh pre show prep

As the bodywork won't be ready for the show, the next best thing is some large art work, so after a friends hard work we have a blinged up MNR GM3

Bus clothing

The bus has also had a bit of a makeover, and is now wearing its full new Autotech race livery

Pre mould making photos

The body is off to the mould shop in he next few days so i thought we'd get a few photos of it out doors before it goes. The daylight has shown a few areas that need slight attention before it goes, but overall its looking pretty damn fine!!! You'll notice at the rear the tunnel like shape exiting the rear panel, this will give an option to create a venturi style tunnel at rear if required, but in RGB this isn't permitted so will be full enclosed by the floor and just a visual feature.

Very ready!

The old girl has really cleaned up well, infact I think its the best she has ever looked. I have a nice new set of boots to go on and i paid some nice Polish man £1 a wheel to polish the the alloys up so that look sparkly too ! Almost wish I could sell her now before she gets another trashing! An extra month has meant lots of time to do the nice finishing off jobs you never seem time to do, so from now on I need to ensure I book latest day a month before the first race of the season....

The final push

The side fences are now finished and sprayed. The spraying really helps you pick out the imperfections and lines, so its now just a case of going round the car filling in the little nasties, applying liberal coats of high build primer and flatting down with some fine grade paper. It will be finished by the end of the week, but unfortunately the mould making guy isn't confident that the mould will be pulled from the plug in time for the Stoneleigh show. If it is ready it will be a bonus, but due to this uncertainty the size of the MNR stand will not include space for the GM bodywork :-(. Although we should have some good large scale photos on display.

 

Its very difficult to see the lines and shapes in the pictures under the garage lights, the fences are almost invisible from certain angles, but then from others it has created some really interesting feature lines and shadows.

Fencing it in

The entire shape of the body is aimed towards getting as much clean air over the back of the rear deck to ensure the rear down force can match the fronts. To stop the air falling off the side of the car we needed to create a fence along the side walls. This will add a radius to the top edges hopefully enhancing the looks and add stiffness of the body. We have the lip/fence around the rear tub already and wanted this to blend in, this meant a rather complex section needed to be created that also needed to morph and blend into the the front of the car, whilst also following the £D curve of the top edge. The last thing we wanted to do was create lots of freehand rubbing down, and ultimately not getting a symmetrical or constant shape. Lots of head scratching and we came up with a plan of creating a fixed top edge that we could then follow using a former that matched the rears tub lipped section. Dad tried to use a section of wood, but it simply wouldn't bend in the 3 dimensions and simple angled section also twisted when attempting to bend it in the 2 directions. Dad then found some cable trunking (we had already used the D section when making the mould for the rear under tray on the Fury) in a quadrant section, with the  curved part of the section removed it left an L section on the top edge that would allow the strip to bend in both directions without deforming.

Section fixed to bodywork. You will notice a thin piece of wood that helped create a constant curve that is glued and screwed to the section and bodywork.

With it held in place lots of bridge filler (green) was applied into the section.

After the filler had set, the wood could be removed, the otherside filled and a radius form ran down between the top edge and top surface.

Then using normal body filler, build up ontop of the bridge filler and shaped by running another former down the outer edge.

A light sanding is now required, then more filler applied and formers ran down either side and the shape should be complete.

Wheel Arch Extraction

I wasn't relishing the offside wheel arch removal, it looked simple enough but destroying all that hard work felt like a big step backwards. But its got to be right, we don't want another Fury type body....

It actually turned out to be very simple and only took 30mins. The arch was 8-10mm narrower than the other side, so the easiest solution was to add another 9mm MDF disc to the larger inner wheel arch guide (this is hard to explain in words). I hadn't included pictures of how we made these guides earlier on in the blog so here you go:-

 

Using a simple MDF jig attached to the router, screwed to a centre point on the sheet of MDF its easy to cut a perfect circle. When we made the initial wheel arch guides we cut 2 of theses, with the outer edge being smaller, then spaced these apart and screwed together to create conical shape. The gap is then filled with foam and filler to create the wheel arch

The outer guide was then unscrewed  from the inner and split apart using a saw

With all the old foam cleaned off and sanded flat, the new spacer disc was screwed on and the outer reattached. The gap then filled with foam and filler applied ready to be sanded down. Obviously all the blend lines to the body will need tidying up too.