Playing The Slots
Posted on Aug 31, 2023
Building this car was always going to be a gamble but we had no idea how addictive it could be. And so, it was proven when we started to consider putting the screens into our bumper slots. We always thought they would need cleaning up a little but the closer we looked the worse they looked. We soon realized they were all the wrong shape and even, to some extent, in the wrong place! Oh boy; another rabbit hole. Here’s a comparison between ours (below) and a works car from back in the day.
It might not be obvious but you can see how the large, upper slots are supposed to have fillets in the corners. They are also supposed to be equi-spaced and centered about the centerline of the bumper. Ours weren’t. Even though most these will be covered by giant spotlights we just couldn’t live with it so set about fixing them. We assumed we could live with the lower, thinner slots as they were however.
Using a suitable size socket, we estimated how much radii we needed in each corner and drew a template and a buck (right term?) to shape the slots around. We thought we’d need to use fiber-glass to add the needed material but as the fillets ended up being really small, we just used reinforced body filler instead. In fact, on many of the slots we were just removing material, they were that far off. So, after hours of filling and sanding over and over we finally had our big slots perfect-ish.
Unfortunately, we then looked at the smaller side slots. They were even further out.
Check back later to see if we managed to leave the lower slots alone. (spoiler alert: we didn’t)
It might not be obvious but you can see how the large, upper slots are supposed to have fillets in the corners. They are also supposed to be equi-spaced and centered about the centerline of the bumper. Ours weren’t. Even though most these will be covered by giant spotlights we just couldn’t live with it so set about fixing them. We assumed we could live with the lower, thinner slots as they were however.
Using a suitable size socket, we estimated how much radii we needed in each corner and drew a template and a buck (right term?) to shape the slots around. We thought we’d need to use fiber-glass to add the needed material but as the fillets ended up being really small, we just used reinforced body filler instead. In fact, on many of the slots we were just removing material, they were that far off. So, after hours of filling and sanding over and over we finally had our big slots perfect-ish.
Unfortunately, we then looked at the smaller side slots. They were even further out.
Check back later to see if we managed to leave the lower slots alone. (spoiler alert: we didn’t)