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Ryan transferred the buck to 1/8" 6061-T6 aluminum plate and that was cut out with a saw by hand. No fancy CNC water jet in our shop (yet) so he did it "old school". Green tape, Sharpie lines, careful measuring, then a jig saw with a steady hand. The edges are ground and cleaned up to remove a sharp edge and it then get's mocked up on the car, above.
Did you notice what changed in the second metal splitter picture above? Look closely. There's a change in splitter height at the ends when compared to the middle. This "channel" was done for engineering reasons as well as for aesthetics. Its a long story, but basically this slightly taller center section feeds some additional air under the car to the rear diffuser (which we will be building very soon).
You can see some fabrication of the lower grill ducting to the radiator, and a little bit of this changed later. The splitter design and fab work spanned over 3 months to get it all just right, so that will be shown in upcoming posts to this thread.
FRONT LOWER VALENCE DESIGN & FABRICATION
This is an important part of the "look" of this car, so dozens of emails, sketches and calls with the customer went over how the front lower grill opening and aero bits would look. The front splitter and valance, along with the hood, will be the key visual aspects of this build. And are also very important for making front downforce.
We mocked-up a lot of different designs until we came up with one that worked for his tastes as well as fed the heat exchangers and brake ducting properly. We could have done this a lot quicker and more cheaply, but it wouldn't have looked as good nor pleased the car owner.
I had hoped to keep the factory foglight holes in the lower valance but lost that battle. The design we all eventually agreed upon would be a lot more work to make, but it also looked better and has more lower opening surface area than our earlier designs. Basically there are three vertical openings that won't make sense until I sneak in some pictures from December, where it is nearly complete. Getting there took a couple of iterations to make it look like the owner wanted.
These two pictures above are after one dead end start, and another revision to this layout, where it was finally getting closer to the look like he wanted. There are coolers mounted in these pictures that have to be fed and have to exhaust heat, with a lot of other considerations as well. We will get to those details in later updates.
Again, I don't want to spoil too much from future posts (November + December work will be in the next 2 posts) so I'm going to leave it there and show the remaining lower valance work in due time.
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