Dan and Daves visit to Alloycars

[mikeinatlanta]

Originally Posted by CobraDan

Answer:

Yes, it will be too big and far off. You can’t use a fiberglass body as a buck. But you can make a heavy buck using the fiberglass body as a reference. The first problems you will encounter are the headlight rings. They will not match the chrome rings from the head lights. Just an example. It will also affect all the gaps and width of the car.

This is somewhat correct. Once again, the answer lies in the old thread where simple truths were dismissed as an attack.

The EASY way to make an alloy body buck would be to take a splash off an existing car and then cast a tool from that splash. You then use the cast tool to stretch form the panels. With stretch forming and assuming an alloy of .050" nominal thickness, your body would be larger by .100" in width at the areas of biggest difference. This does not take into account the high stretch areas such as headlight rings where the material would be thinner, or compressed areas where it would be thicker. When considering the inaccuracies of the FFR MKII body, being off by .100" is nothing, besides, just a slight bit of trimming and things get very close. Any minor issues that crop up, such as the light ring example, can be easily resolved with minimal massaging.

As I already stated on the other thread, the issue with this type of tooling is that it is only suitable for very short production runs and I don't believe for a second that they have invested the $$ necessary for durable tooling. If they had, it would be something any reasonable company would show off rather than hide (think Kirkham).

For those of you who have no sheet metal experience, trust a guy that has 35 years aviation structural experience when I say that there hasn't been a significant development in sheet metal forming since chem milling and hydro forming. Any claims to have some sort of secret new process is pure BS.

So where does that leave us? We have a company that is secretive, deceptive, combative, and is making something that many of us would love to have. I have no issue with them making simple copies of anyone's body, however, like the photos they took, I see a pattern of behavior such that they would never get a penny of mine.