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Progress Report for July 15, 2004 |
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Click here to view an image gallery associated with this diary entry.
 I find that the body taking shape in my garage is looking remarkably like the last set of renderings I made back in March 2004. This is very encouraging as I like the shape.And why shouldn't it look the same? The ribs are derived directly from the computer model!
 Temps in the garage have been hovering around 105f with humidity in the 30% range. I would actually prefer 110f with 5% humidity. That level of humidity is much more comfortable. One just has to make sure to drink lots of water. Right now though it's just miserable slogging around with sweat dripping onto everything and getting in my eyes. I especially have to be careful of the drywall since it is gypsum based and therefore not waterproof! Next garage will be air-conditioned!
 I have made some important discoveries about building car bodies from scratch using the rib and foam method. First let me say that things have gotten a lot harder since I moved onto the sides of the car. I am having a hard time aligning all of the side pieces with the goal of making them meet properly in the middle. It's due to my missing an important facet in the design phase that I find myself in this predicament.
I built the front part of the car, fine, no problems. I built the back part of the car, fine no problems. These areas are easy to measure from side-to-side and the ribs are continuous from one side to the other. The sides of the car though. Oh' boy! I don't have a reference system built into my templates. Word of advice to anyone following in my tracks. Make damn sure that all of your template pieces include reference markings indicating the location of the other ribs. In my case, if I had simply drawn two 1" circles on every template and a line referencing plumb I could have saved countless hours of agonizing measuring and re measuring and in the end just plain old guessing where each rib will go. I definitely see that some of the side ribs will have to be attacked with a sander to bring them into spec. At least they are out of spec on both sides so I can grind symmetrically. <argh>
On the bright side of the coin, (always good to look for that) the foam and rib construction method IS working quite well overall. I simply missed that important item in the preparation phase. In other developments, I have been working on improving the website. The biggest changes are the addition of a discussion forum and a changeover to a much improved image gallery. The old gallery dumped all of my images into one folder. You can imagine that with over 500 images in the galleries having all of them listed in one folder made things difficult when it came to inserting the proper image into my diary entries! My new gallery Menalto Gallery integrates with Mambo and also serves as a standalone system. BTW - I have set it up so that you can order prints if you feel so inclined! |
