Wooden Morgan: 1950 DHC - Week 9

Time to pretty it up a bit.

First glue on the radiator:

And sand the rad smooth with the bonnet.

Install the bonnet hinge.

Put in the Trafficators.

The louvers are cut from a strip of 1/16" x 9/16" Black Walnut exposing 1/16" to be shaped. Make them a squeese fit and an elastic band is all the clamp needed during gluing.

I have both left hand and right hand angled carving blades that made short work of rounding the leading sides of the louvers.

After sanding and working the tops and bottoms with a micro file the louvers are looking good.

I did the chrome side trims in four pieces each; bonnet, scuttle, door, and rear panel.  The Hop Hornbeam is very flexible so I got the curve at the rear by simply pressing the strip into the rear curve and bending down as I pressed the rest of it into place.  On the door, which starts the taper to the front, I made a couple of shallow cuts with a hack saw on the back of the trim to let it flex more easily.  The 2x4 side cutoffs were used in the clamps to press the trim tight while the glue set.

The lumber beside the car is for the scuff guards on the wings and the dowels are for the windscreen pillars.

Oh, and there is another spot of the punky centre to fill on the left front wing.


Check List Update

Done:

- Cut outlines of the doors and the bonnet.
- Do a wood inlay of some Hop Hornbeam for the bonnet hinge.
- Do a wood inlay of some Hop Hornbeam for the side trim.
- Bonnet louvers
- Trafficators

To Do:

- Bonnet catch knobs
- Door handles
- Wind screen pillars
- Wind screen frame
- Head lights
- Hub caps
- Gas and rad caps
- Spare hold down
- Steering wheel (top that shows above the door)
- ? Morgan wings badge for the radiator?

Then:
- Assemble body, headlights, door handles, gas and rad caps, bonnet knobs, and wings
- Router off under the wings.
- Round off edges of wings.
- Apply Tung Oil finish.
- Install wheels and spares.

Wooden Morgan: 1950 DHC - Week 8

I spent two days designing and gluing together the jig to help make the bonnet louver slots.  It has a base that gets clamped into a bench vise.  The router guide clamps onto a little table on the top edge of the base.  The model gets clamped against the vertical part of the base and moved for each cut.  That is the fiddly bit as it takes anywhere from ten seconds to ten minutes to line up each cut.

First step in using this jig is to put alignment marks on the model where each louver's line crosses the base of the bonnet.  I positioned the top of the back louver on each side of the body, and extended a line to the bottom of the block at 20.5 degrees from the vertical. The louvers are 1/16" wide and spaced 1/8" apart, so I marked 1/8" intervals perpendicular to the first line then used the protractor to extended these points to the bottom.  I also taped a 1/8" scrap of wood to the far side bottom to tilt the car slightly to make the side of the bonnet close to horizontal in the jig.

To position the router guide, you need the length of the centre line from the edge of the jig base to the guide's top stop.  It is the radius of the router base plus the length of the sloped line from the top of the louver to the base of the model body minus one half the router bit diameter (1/32").  The measurements from the top stop to the base on each side will be the centre line length plus and minus the radius of the router base times the tangent of 20.5 degrees.  Mark both of these distances on both inner sides of the guide.  The bottom stop slides, its distance from the top stop is the diameter of the router base plus 1/2" minus the diameter of the router bit.  Clamp the router guide to the table aligning the side measurements to get the correct tilt for the side of the car you are going to work on.  Then mark the centre line of the guide on the edge of the base's table. After that just line up a mark on the bottom of the block with the centre line on the table, clamp and then cut with the router.

Afterwards I did a little work to deepen the side trim groove along the bonnet and then sanded the body and the wings with 150 grit.

 Next I will cut the trim pieces and start putting it together.

Wooden Morgan: 1950 DHC - Week 7

I was just checking the blog statistics, last week it got its first visitors from China and this week they were back again.  Are they tooling up to mass produce wooden Morgans?  Watch your local dollar store.

No dramatic crossing off from the check list for me this week, just scratching or more precisely scraping, the surface of some the items.  I made the slots on the body for the side chrome trim and the Trafficators and the slots on the wings for the scuff guards.

I thinned the cutter on the bit I made for the beading tool to 5/64" to match a standard drill size.  This makes it easy to finish the ends of the slots with neat round ends.

I'm growing fond of double sided tape, it has almost as many uses as duct tape. I needed to hold down the body while working on it with the beading tool. Any clamp would get in the way somewhere along the car's length.  A strip of double sided tape holds the side cut-offs from the 2x4 block, another strip in the side cut-off holds the body.  No clamps required.  Some strips of masking tape across the front and back were added for insurance.

The beading tool worked fine along the horizontal part even with the 5 degree inward slope at the front of the bonnet.  Some trigonometric calculations assured me that the difference in height from the base was just 0.007".

Fiddling around with a compass on the drawings I found that the centre of the little curve at the rear of the side trim was inside the rear wheel well.  I drilled a hole there that would hold a finishing nail snuggly.  It became the pivot for the beading tool as I cut the curve.

Here is a hint of what the side trim will look like.

Next job with the beading tool was to make the slots for the scuff guards on the wings.  These are narrower than the trim, using the ones on my '59 +4 as a guide they scale down to exactly 1/16".  This time it only took half an hour to make a 1/16" wide scraper on the other end of the 5/64" one, the one that took me 2 days to finish.  The long slot is parallel to the outer side of the wing so it was straight forward to cut.  Again double sided tape held the work piece securely while I scraped away.  The short slot is angled slightly, measuring 1/16" offset over 1 3/8" on the diagram.  That works out to 1/2" over 11".  I cut that taper on a scrap of 2x4. I marked the wing profile on the side for band sawing, but since the two wings would be cut using opposite sides of the tapered guide I split the difference in the angle of the profile surface by propping it up a 1/4" at its 11" mark when I ran it through the band saw.

The Trafficators go in a 1/16" slot too.  To make these I removed the tool holder from the beading tool's handle and guided it against a piece of softwood clamped to the side of the car.

Just for fun I taped the wings in place to see how it looks.

There is one more groove cutting task, the bonnet louvers.  I have a half baked idea for a router jig, but that was from when I thought the sides were perpendicular.  Now the bonnet sides change angle across the area of the louvers.  I guess I can insert shims (with double sided tape) to tilt it as I move closer to the front....

Wooden Morgan: 1950 DHC - Week 6

Radiator Mark II

Using the approach of adding in the grill bars instead of removing the spaces between the bars I could now use the router to level off the indentation to the fronts of the top and bottom tanks.  After doing a little geometry I came up with this jig to guide the router.  A little two sided tape holds the work piece in its slot.

Some touch up with a chisel squares the lower corners.

I'm going to cut out slots where the grill bars go, so measure and mark the distances to each line on the grill.  And mark the top and bottom tank lines.

Then I cut out the radiator opening with a coping saw and filed its sides flat and square in the corners.

The fancy magnetic saw guide I bought only works on the outside edge of a board, no help for the internal cuts I need here.  But the dove tail saw has the exact kerf width needed for the grill bars so I used it with a squared piece of hard wood for a guide.

I then fitted the grill pieces, cutting their ends on an angle with tin snips until they slid in close to the face of the rad.

Here it is after gluing in the bars and sanding the grill flat.

I succeeded in cutting the sides at (close) to the 15 degree angle they should be. 

The right side ended up a little off angle, because the band saw blade slipped out of the top guide when I tilted the head, letting the blade flexed a bit on the first cut.  Another thing I have to add to my 'Working with Band Saw' check list.

A little sanding to round the sides and top and we have a radiator.

One more item off the check list.  Speaking of check list, here is what is left to do:
- Cut outlines of the doors and the bonnet.
- Do a wood inlay of some Hop Hornbeam for the bonnet hinge.
- Do a wood inlay of some Hop Hornbeam for the side trim.
- Do a wood inlay of Black Walnut for the wings' scuff protectors.
- Bonnet louvers
- Head lights
- Bonnet catch handles
- Door handles
- Trafficators
- Spare hold down
- Wind screen pillars
- Wind screen frame
- Hub caps
- Gas and rad caps
- Steering wheel (top that shows above the door)
- ? Morgan wings badge for the radiator?

The outlining of the doors and back edge of the bonnet was easy with the little V chisel.

Another one off the list.

I was intending to use the router to make the slots for the wood inlay but with the three dimensional curves on the car I abandoned that idea.  Instead I'm using a beading tool that holds a custom made scraper bit that scratches the wood out slowly but very accurately.  I practised several times on the prototype Plus 8 model,

... before cutting the groove for the Flat Rad's bonnet hinge.

Hmm... Now how am I going to make that curve at the back of the groove for the side trim?  Or maybe I'll tackle some of the easier items on the check list next week.