Tail Section Part 1

First, I took all the other bodywork that I worked on to get painted and here is a sneak peak of what the car is going to look like!

The car came with two different tail sections, one with an air scoop on driver's left that was built into the tail (which is the one that was last used on the car) and one with the ability to take in air in the center even though it had an air scoop that attached to the left side as well. 

The Honda Fit engine has the air filter in the center so it made sense to use the tail section that has the air intake in the center. 

The HPD kit came with a fiberglass piece that is supposed to be bonded into the RF99 Van Diemen tail section which is quite a bit different then my RF97.  It didn't take me long to figure out that that piece wasn't going to work well with my car and this tail section.  For one thing, it is too narrow at the roll bar for my car which is a shame because it is a nice piece.

So now it was time to cut up a perfectly good tail section so that I could see what needed to be changed.  I expanded the cut out section for the roll bar and cut out a section of the tail on driver's right where the engine is.

My tail is actually two pieces and I'm debating about bonding the two pieces together again.  Nevertheless, I needed to see how the smaller piece was affected so I joined the two with the zeus fasteners and some screws and proceeded to cut out a section on the right.

In regards to the left side, I had the exact opposite problem.  The Ford engine that was in the car had the carburator on the left side so the bodywork is much wider on that side.  The slot that is there is for the air scoop which I don't need.  The lines that I have drawn give you an idea of what I plan on cutting to modify that side.

Getting back to the right side, I really had to think about how to make the bubble in the tail section.  First, I taped pieces of cardboard to get a rough shape.

To be honest, I threw away my first attempt.  I tried to go straight to making a rough fiberglass piece by laying a bunch of duct tape on the inside of the cardboard and then putting mold release wax on it so that I could pull the fiberglass piece off of it.  But the piece turned out to be way too rough.  I would have had to use a lot of bondo to make it close to useable.  So, I decided to go with plan B which was too use two part expandable foam which can be sculpted.  First, I needed to make a "bowl" for it.  Again, I got out the cardboard and the duct tape.  Btw, the tape that I use is Gorrilla tape which has to be the strongest tape around and can be bought at Home Depot.

After applying some mold release wax, I then poured the foam and after it set I was able to pull the foam out of the hole so that I could remove all of the tape and cardboard.

I then inserted it back into the hole and used more tape on the backside and even some toothpicks to hold it in place so that I could shape it with.  I even used some strips of tape on the front side and sculpted around them and re-located them as needed.  I did most of the sculpting with my palm sander with 80 grit sandpaper.  Here is where I left off and I think this is good enough to fiberglass over.  I'm crossing my fingers that I didn't take too much off!!