Blimey, over 4 months have passed apparently!
Ooops!
In my defence, along with a loss of mojo, a lovely lady has entered my life and takes up a lot of what used to be my modelling time, although she fully supports my hobby, so that's a plus!
So what have I been doing ? The answer is, quite a lot of 3d designing, test printing, tweaking designs, reprinting, etc.
Most of this work has been in the front wing/suspension area. The kit has no braces for the front wings, or friction dampers, so those had to be done.
These are the braces:
The trick here was to get the curve right! I started by looking a little more closely at the inner wings where they meet the chassis and realised that the moulded bodywork was too rounded at that point. Problem solved simply enough by attacking the inner wings with a scalpel blade and paring it back to a) give a sharper edge, and b) take the edge back to meet the chassis rails. Then a piece of solder was pressed into the wing to give me the correct shape. I took a photo of that against a pair of rulers. The pic was imported to Fusion as a canvas to give me a reference to work from.
[/url]
The basic design...
That was printed to check the fit, adjusted as necessary, and detail added. I had to reduce the length by a couple of mm but the curve was good first time. This pic also shows how much I removed from the inner wings to take them back to the chassis rails and square them off.
The final version looks like this
One further issue I noted was that the kit moulded front springs are flat across the top instead of curving downwards. After measuring everything and realising that the springs are pretty close to the correct thickness and the axle is at the correct height, I decided to accept the kit springs as I don't want to get into issues with the ride height (it's correct as it is).
After printing the wing braces, the next item to tackle was the friction shocks.
Since I had no size references, I decided the best way to go was to cut a paper mock up, try it for size, adjust it, then take a pic against a ruler and import as a canvas in the same way as I did for the braces.
It was pretty small!
The design was pretty straight forward.
Printing revealed that the two legs are not the same length so that was adjusted, and they were reprinted.
There is also a small linkage between the front crossmember and the damper attached to the rear of the wing brace, so I decided to adjust the front crossmember and reprint it. I also adjusted the front brake drums slightly to lower the actuating arms and reprinted those too.
A test fit of the new front end parts was satisfactory!
While I was on a roll I decided to go ahead and print the steering linkages. I don't have any pics that show the fitting to the left brake drum so I had a best guess.
The connection to the steering box was deliberately made too long, that will be adjusted later, but the fit and angles are, I think, OK.
After that little lot, I looked at the steering wheel mounting and realised that the dashboard was wrong.
The moulded recess where the steering column mounts should not be there!
So I snipped it out with a pair of snips. Bad move!
Oh well! Nothing for it then other than to design and print a replacement dashboard!
I managed to remove the part without damaging the bodywork, photographed it, and imported as a canvas to draw around.
Some small tweaks were required to the left edge, and I enhanced the dial bevels a little, giving me this...
Sometimes it helps to be clumsy with the snips! I think that's a big improvement!
While in that area I decide to do the grab handle for the passenger.
I seem to have forgotten to take a pic of the printed handle, but they have come out nicely!
I have since painted the new parts and will update soon. The next step will be to get some bodywork colour on the undersides of the wings and running boards before fitting the chassis and new parts.
Stay tuned, I promise to update again within 3 months!
Thanks for looking in!
Ian
