My faithful, dedicated, talented, awesome, Team has literally whittled out a foundation for me to begin doing "my thing" - extreme design concepts. I am winding up...
At this point, I am still exploring the feasibility of what I have in mind for Schism's grille. I design in my head, and CAD is my first tool of choice to translate it; with the fringe benefit of being the next logical/best step towards making the ideas a tangible reality. I can print drawings and patterns, or cut/print directly from the CAD models.
This is the ball and socket design I see in my head. The green areas are what you would not see as that would be inside the material of the "shell". The gray flip side of those surfaces are the socket, that would be machined into each shell half. The gap between the mesh bar ball and the socket surface, are the thickness of the carbon fiber cloth. They would not actually float, they would be effectively trapped by the sockets, when the grille halves are clamped together. The visual effect is for them to appear to float though. That flat, abruptly cut off edge of the sockets is the inside edge of the grille shell. So, you would see the ball "floating" in the sockets, in kind of a cutaway, like those awesome drawings and actual sliced engines that let you see the internals.
From this point, I have enough actual physical data to begin exploring machining and printing processes, to determine how feasible, or not, this idea actually is. For example, the surfaces of the sockets will require a small diameter ball-end mill, which adds substantially to the time each shell half will be on the machine; and how much hand finishing work is required to produce the desired final result. That is always a balancing act between how much the machine does, and how much the man does. Time is money. Also, this shell is supposed to be curved, swept back towards the cowl, at the top. That can be done on a 4 axis machine, from a rather substantial piece of billet, or post machine process, by actually bending the machined part; but it has to be bent precisely and perfectly or the machined part is ruined - time is money. I will eventually model the entire shell and test both routes, digitally; unless I find that the whole idea is completely unfeasible for this project. I am kind of hoping it adds-up, because what I see in my head is pretty cool, and I would like to see it in real life.
We should conduct some of the first feasibility tests this evening. I will prepare one of the ball-ended mesh bar models for 3D printing, so we can run it through the machine software and get an idea how much time we'll actually spend there. Additive manufacturing makes the most sense with complex, dense, parts so I have an idea for growing a little forest of these bars, that would be pretty cool - if it adds up. Might be a cool project to do a time-lapse video of...