This is the nose meeting up with the crush box.
Ok, so there are a number of items to get to look a little better!! None of them are completely finished yet but they are at the point where I can still work on them while the car is with Eric.
First, I will explain what I'm doing with the crush box so that it takes on a more similar shape to the nose -- which is more curved. On one side, I needed to add material that was at least 1/4" thick. I didn't want to do all of that in bondo so I decided to use foam because I could sand it easily and it is obviously very light. Some types of foam will dissolve if it comes in contact with resin or bondo but I found some 1/2" styrofoam at a craft store that seemed to be pretty resistant to that. It was definitely resistant enough to the bondo that I could use it. I used bondo to glue it to the crush box and then I sculpted it with sand paper.
I then started to fill in the areas around it with bondo.
This is where it stands now. It just takes lots of sanding and re-applying of bondo until I'm happy with it!
Now I'm moving onto how the shock cover meets the cowling. This required a little more demolition. First, I think one reason why it was so out of shape is because over time the center fastener squished the shock cover to the point that it was flat on top and wider at the sides. So, I'm not going to use the center fastener and instead I will use side fasteners that will join the nose/shock cover to the side panels. However, I do like how the center fastener locates the shock cover so I came up with the idea of installing a pin.
I used high strength epoxy and put it underneath the head and then used fiberglass filler to surround the pin on the underside of the shock cover. I also used a grinder to take down the head a little bit and put more fiberglass filler around the top side of the pin where I removed the fiberglass and bondo. I then fiberglassed over the top of the pin and will use bondo to get the curvature that I want. I also re-fiberglassed the area where the pin will go into and drilled a smaller hole for the pin.
I think that will work pretty well!! The next task was to get the shock cover shape to better match the cowling -- which meant removing a lot of material!
Obviously I needed to lay some more fibreglass so in order to fill the holes and to end up with the shape that I wanted, I taped some flashing to the top of the cover so that it matched the curvature. Fiberglass resin doesn't stick to the flashing so flashing is a great to use for this. Here are pics of the bottom side with the flashing in place. You can also see that I sanded the fiberglass on the underside so that the new fiberglass would adhere to it properly.
And here is the top side after the fiberglass was layed.
I just need to cover the areas with bondo and get the shape to match the cowling.
Next, it was time to tackle the gaps between the nose/shock cover and the side panels/crush box. I had to think about this task for a while. I didn't really want to try to fill it with bondo and I did try to fit the pieces better by removing some material but I wasn't getting anywhere fast. I finally came up with the idea to use balsa wood. Balsa wood is flexible, sands easily, and even compresses. So I went to my local hobby shop and bought a bunch of 1/8" X 1/8" and 1/8" and 1/16" strips. I used more of the high strength epoxy to bond the strips to the nose/shock cover and I glued it so that it was less than 1/16" from the edge so that I could fill that gap with bondo. The pic on the right shows that I glued two 1/8" strips so that one was on top of the other to fill the 1/4" gap.
The basic structure is there now and they just require bondo and sanding like the other areas. That is it for now, I will post pics as pieces are finished and hopefully Eric will send me some pics of his progress with the chassis so that I can post those as well.
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