I thought I'd have a go at the front arches to see what they would look like. Having looked at loads of photos, the new arch should sit nicely over the tyre at this point with the amount of drop the suspension will have. I decided I wanted to make the arch 30mm narrower than it was, so I marked out the cut marks in indelible pen & then taped the line to cut
I wanted a bit of a flared arch to the rear to stop all of the stones & water coming down the sides of the car, so this was left slightly wider at this point & forms pretty much a striaght line down from the top of the arch centre.
Using a 1mm cutting disc I then cut off the arch
The cut off piece of arch was then placed onto a sheet of steel & a line scribed around it. This was then cut out with an air shears. The bottom edge of the arch was then drawn onto the sheet for the second cut
The arch was then cut out
The edge of the arch where it had been cut was then trimmed to get it smooth
The new arch was then taped into place to check it fitted ok
This is how it looks from the front.
The new arch will be taped to the body with duct tape with some timber supports & the inside will then be gel coated & have the fibreglass matt layed up on the inside, which is the same process that I'm going to do with the front valance. Once it's all cured I can remove this panel and sand the gel coat to form a radius to the edge of the arch. I'll add a bit of a taper to the arch "face" at the bottom edges, but will wait until it has some tyres on before doing that. I'm pretty happy with the way the buck looks mocked up like this, but I still need to finish off the bottom of the arch where it meets the valance & sill though. On the aluminium shell these arches will have a wired edge. All I need to do now is to use this piece as a template for the other side & repeat the process
cheers...Nige
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