Cover Story

Progress on the engine cover has been steady over the last week or so.  After modifying my Sealey metal folder I was hopeful of a pretty good result with bending the flanges on my nicely wheeled panel and it did a fair job.  Far more precise and uniform than was possible before my modifications but in all honesty still not as crisp as the edges on the original.  I tried a number of things to crisp them up before making a doohickey especially for the purpose.

The simple device I made, by cutting a slot in a square drift allows me to hammer down on the edge of the flange to drive into the corner whilst at the same time preventing the flange from distorting.  The slot is a couple of millimetres shorter than the flange, thus ensuring I don’t damage the face.  Used alternately with a slapper & dolly on the side of the flange I smartened up the angle pretty well.  It might need a bit more work when I try fitting it but we’ll see…  A little shrinking of the edges produced the right profile to the panel and it started to look pretty good.  Of course this brought me to just the point in the production process where you can really balls it up.

Engine Cover Skin VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The handle passes through the skin with a shouldered hole. The aperture is 29mm but the shoulder is a couple of mill deep so the hole size needed to be 25mm.  I own one hole punch…it’s 30mm.  After a brief period of swearing and stamping my foot I realised that the punch had a nice taper on the back edge that might prove useful after all.  A test piece confirmed that it was spot-on for starting the shoulder!  After carefully transposing the position from my paper template I drilled and used the punch to create a witness mark.  A step drill and die grinder soon roughed out the hole and after hand finishing with a file I ran the punch again with an improvised flaring attachment.

After a whizz round with the aviation shears… A pretty passable engine cover skin.  Now if only I had something to attach it to.

Not Enough Hours in a Bay

It’s been a busy weekend.  In addition to fitting a new inlet valve mechanism in Nanny’s toilet and replacing a leaking radiator valve in the Mother in Laws central heating system, I’ve even done a bit of metal shaping.

I have a spare engine bay cover for the Amigo and I’m making a new skin for it as a prelude to replacing the skin on my original.  Once the original is restored I’ll sell the spare one.  I thought it would be a quick win job, a bit of a morale boost.  How wrong was I.

The skin is essentially a flat panel.  Of course there is no such thing as a flat panel on a car.  Even a panel that looks ostensibly flat has to have a shallow crown or it will look like an oil can once it has a shiny coat of paint on it.  Somewhat counter intuitively, a shallow crown is probably harder to produce than a lot of shape.  A flat panel is really not forgiving of a slight irregularity.

After creating a paper template from the existing panel and cutting a blank, I put my shallowest anvil into the E-wheel and started to gently work the piece.  Unfortunately, working it on my own proved to be a mistake.  Unable to support the full length of the piece on my own the panels own weight caused uneven stretching, quickly rendering it a failure.  Piece number two was more successful.  With Jules assisting and a much more methodical approach the right crown was painstakingly achieved.  The time consuming exercise was a real eye opener and has made me up my game with the wheel.  A dot punch through the paper template allowed me to transfer all of my dimensions onto the panel and I then punched out a hole at each corner and snipped out the flash between what will become flanges.  Folding those flanges over is going to be a story all on it’s own!