Post holiday progress - wheel guards

 Things got cut short after my last post, holiday prep took over and then it was a week off in an AirBnB. It was a nice holiday, but each evening I felt like I ought to be in the garage!

Anyway, the Sunday after we got back I jumped straight into the garage to get the wheel guards sorted. After the last attempt I decided a smaller guard was required. Also while on hols I was thinking of material, having to use fibreglass vs other options. To get fibreglass to work I would have had to create a mould. That mould would be duplicated both sides and would take a while to process, along with having a poor finish at the end that I would have to fix. 

I was doing fibreglass because I thought the thickness would play a part. But thickness is only relevant at the edge, where the IVA rears its ugly head again. A bit of clip on trim would suffice to make it 'pedestrian friendly', and that would probably apply to fibreglass as well as metal. 

In any case, a new mould was made, this one at a 10 degree downward angle rather than the 45 degrees the previous one ended up with. This required a raised end template but the process was still the same;

This is the front end at about 40 degrees, so past the required angle. This gives me enough space to do a round edge. It's similar at the back, past the required 50 degrees and 150mm. 

After that I cut some aluminium to size;

I'm a lot happier with this, it's much smaller and more in keeping with the whole design of the car. It's still bigger than the racing Healey I'm using as inspiration, but that can't be helped.

With the wrapping off I can see what it's going to be like;

With the black edge trim I think it'll look really good. The only thing I do need to decide is whether to use some black piping on the inside edge, at the moment it's so tight on the seam that it looks like the bodywork rests on top of it rather than the guard being attached to the side!

With one side now complete it was a simple case of flattening it out, inverting it and cutting a new one for the other side. That works almost immediately, with only a minor amount of fettling to be done where the bodywork isn't quite a mirror image.

The last job was to leave a mark on the body where the panel sits;

Taking comparable pictures side by side shows that I'm pretty much on target with a matching pair, again there's slight differences because of the bodywork not being a perfect mirror image but I can work round them. I took all measurements from the wing seam, so even if they're in slightly different places the overall look will match left and right. 

Now that I'm back to a movable car I can get on with other jobs. The rear guards can wait, I'll follow the same process but I need to turn the car round as there's zero room at the back. That'll be fun, a U turn on the drive, with a car with only hand tight suspension and steering!