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....