Brooklands Bentley

So I didn't get quite as far as I planned today. But still managed to get the rear bulkhead and dash hoop made up along with the belly pan frames. A fair bit of time was spent getting the tooling set up, which involved searching through boxes trying to find the right sized rollers for my rolling machine and dies for the mandrel bender. Was also the first time that I have used the rolling machine since purchasing it a year or so back for another project. So that was kinda cool.

I did forego making up templates in favour of 'eyeing-it'. This kind of behaviour can obviously go one of two ways lol. Fortunately the profiles came out okay. The trick is to make the bends up in sections and then chop them at the 'apex' before stitching them together, rather than trying to bend them up out of one continuous piece. You do need to plan your bends and also get a little bit of wastage, but steel is cheaper than time so it's a good tradeoff. There is so much variation between the actual full sized cars that a little 'artistic license' is not going to make a big difference. Plus to a degree I'm limited with the radius of the mandrel bender.

I still need to set the height of the bulkhead and dash hoop, but cannot really do that until the belly pan frames are installed. These need to be in place so that I can get judgement of the overall body height from the bottom of the pan to the top of the hood. Scaling from my overlay the dash hoop is supposed to be correct, but it looks a little too low, which I think is just an optical illusion with the belly pan frames missing.

The belly pan frames are simply small hoops that sit underneath the chassis rails to give the sills that rolled under look and drop the floor down below the chassis. I'll weld some 2mm steel plate to the bottom for the floor and extend the bodywork down to meet the floorpan.

Tomorrow I should get those parts stitched up and take a look at the grille hoop. I have a bit of an idea on how to make up the grille surround, but again I'm going to try and wing-it a little as I don't have the luxury of time to build a buck.