Skirt Work with Matthew

First, here's my new car. How do you like it?




Yes, that was a joke.

Matthew's shop leases space to an exotic car builder. The guy builds something like one car a year, these things can easily run over $750K. There were several other amazing cars in the garage.

Matthew is 6'5", to give you a sense of scale of this car.



Okay, back to the real world of building. Matthew suggested we take a shot at building some of the skirt with the CNC machine. We were especially curious to see if the CNC could cut the curved styrene piece.

Before anything else, Matthew had to make the spoil board, which includes drilling holes for the vacuum to hold down the material that's going to be cut. The router bit plunges through the material and just slightly into the spoil board. Foam tape is applied to the outline of the areas to be cut, to help keep the seal on the vacuum around the parts.



First, we cut the styrene curved pieces. Would the styrene melt?



No problem! The CNC cut these pieces perfectly. We were able to cut a lot of these from just a portion of the styrene sheet.



Next, we cut a few base plates from 1/2" Baltic birth plywood. This is the same piece I cut with Kelvin a few days ago.



Here's some video of the CNC in action, the machine makes two passes to cut through all the material.




Finally, Matthew cut several of the support pieces that help with the mounting of the skirt. Tomorrow, we plan to pick up where we left off tonight.



Might there be a run of these in the future? You never know...