Quote:
Originally Posted by DanEC
Kevin - that door skin and the shot of the rear bulkhead look great. Probably smoother than the originals ever were. So you molded a cover to fit there and then covered the mold with vinyl. What did you mold the covers from?
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Hi Dan - thanks. and basically, 'yes' - I made a mould from parts on the car, but then I laminated on the inside of the mould to make a 'grp skin', so that I had a nice smooth exposed surface for gluing the vynil.
Heres some description of my laminating and trimming exploits. Rather verbose, but hopefully some readers might find it interesting:
The rear flat panel over the back of the cockpit is a sheet of 3mm ali cut after drawing a cardboard template. I then drilled holes along the top and bottom, drilling through into the rear cockpit wall as well to get the alignment right. The bottom holes were countersunk, and then c/s screws superglued in place and locknut-ed on the other side. Then I covered the panel in vynil covering the bottom c/s screws and wrapping the vynil edge behind the panel. Once the panel was offered up in place, I pushed the bottom row of screws through the holes and used plan nuts to nip these up, not too tight. I then pushed button head screws through the top of the panel - these are hidden up under the cockpit surround, and again nipped these up, initially with wing nuts, as it was a real pain doing all of this single handed - i needed arms like that guy from Fantastic 4. I then took some thin plastic/vynil? piping trim and pushed this under the gap between the panel and the carpet and continued all the way round to produced a piped edge between the vynil and the carpet - ofcourse no original cars had this, but your ERA is a more authentic design at the rear cockpit than on my car, so i think your carpet wont come up so high.
The rear wheel inner wing covers and the skins for the doors were all made the same way. These were early learning exercises for when I made the grp footboxes you can also see in my gallery - learning to laminate was one of my plans for this project- really is very easy on small pieces. The inner wings were painted in-situ in liquid pva (blue stuff, not the white glue stuff). I then mixed up some gelcoat and when this had gone tacky applied 2 layers of medium thickness matting and laminated in place. 1 hour later I took a screwdriver and levered off, what was now, the mould. I then tidied the mould up with a Dremel removing the sharp grp edges, washed it out and let it set for a few days. Then I repeated the above process to make a 'skin' for trimming using this new mould. Using only 1-2 layers of grp allows the resulting 'skin' to flex a bit and fit nicely over the original surface on the car. The door skins were made exactly the same way after removing the doors on the car and making a mould in my kitchen (stank out the house):
Making the mould:
http://www.cobraclub.com/gallery/sho...lay-up/cat/500
Resulting 'skin' taken from the mould:
http://www.cobraclub.com/gallery/sho...r-skin/cat/500
Both door skins and the inner wings required a fair bit of hair-dryer heat to make the vynil 'give' enough to cover the compound curves without wrinkles. My long suffering G/F provided an extra pair of hands for gently tugging and stretching the vynil, although the really tough part was the concave curve at the very upper from part of the door skin. There are a few pics of all of this in my gallery, but the uk cobraclub hosting site has jumbled them up, so they arent in the right order.