...and while I'm waiting for the paint to cure on my dash mould, I've started work on the body.
As my 'kit' is of dubious origin - I
think it's a Banham New Speedster, but I'm not certain - some panels don't appear to be quite the same size as your average Speedster kit.
Having secured a curved grille from Martin & Walker, I found that it was exactly 1/2" too long for the opening in the engine cover. Additionally, the radius of the corners of the opening didn't quite match that of the grille and the curve didn't match at the lower edge just for good measure.
So, using a technique I developed when trying to get the lower rear edges of my Sammio bonnet to match the curve of the body, I cut a section out of the opening and sawed 'comb' teeth around the opening where it needed to move. With the grille encased in polythene sheet and fitted in place, I then glassed the reverse of the engine cover, fixing the 'comb' teeth in their new positions -
The grille now fits the opening and the opening matches the curve of the grill, so I'm happy with the results -
I also decided to see if I could make a head-fairing that would suit the Speedster body shape. Most of the fairings I've seen added to Speedsters look a bit short and dumpy to my eye, so I thought I'd try to replicate the ones Porsche fitted to the 718RSK Spyders -
I'd already made a start on fabricating a rear deck cover that (deliberately) looks a lot like the RSK's rear deck, but to make a start on the fairing I needed something roughly the right size and shape to use as a template for the head fairing 'pad' itself.
Luckily, I had previously used a sheet of plywood as base when spraying some Triumph engine parts and noticed this outline of the front timing cover -
A bit of pencilling in followed by some careful jigsaw action and my head pad was pretty much the right size and shape. Having measured the distance and drop from the front face of my deck cover to the engine lid opening and with reference to many images of cars with head fairings (including my old Spyder) I drew the profile shape of the fairing freehand onto some plywood and cut that out.
The next steps were to cut out smaller and smaller versions of the head pad shape and slot them together like this -
...resulting in a former to work from that looks like this -
Happy with progress so far, next step is to cover it with cardboard and parcel tape and glass over the outside, wihch I'm off to do now.
More later
