lol, you'd better get insurance before you start molding on a rental!!!.......if you took two weeks you could compleatly mold the car over with a few friends!.......alot of wax.........ALOT and a ton of mold release..but yeah you can...
Maybe get it digitized, some of the scanners are getting affordable.
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there are a few ways to take a set of moulds from a car without damaging the paint, but making grp panels straight from the car is always going to be very very risky, I'd expect to budget for a respray if I was going to go this route because no matter how careful you are grp can still cause all kinds of issues. I work in very high end composites for the some of the biggest motorsport teams in the world and I still wouldn't be willing to risk taking a grp mould straight from an oem panel without causing it any damage. there are way around it though. if you have access to the car you want to mould then it can be done in just a few days with no risk of damage. laser scanning and then milling the plug is another option but it can get incredibly expensive and time consuming. taking a 3d scan and turning it into a 3d object is no where near as easy as it sounds when you're talking about something as complex as a car. it'll take hundreds of hours of manipulation be very skilled people to get the surfaces ready to be cnc'd, and when that's done it requires good quality (expensive) foam and then fine finishing and painting, etc before a set of moulds can be made from that. all in all a very long and expensive process. My method is much much quicker and a lot cheaper too, with no chance of damaging the paint and still getting exact copies of the panels. it's all a matter of getting hold of a car to start with.
As for renting an f40 - no way. you just won't be able to do it. if you do find somewhere expect to remortgage your house to be able to pay for it! your best bet is plastic fantastic on this forum, he had the oem LM tooling i believe.
enzo designs are still around and working on bits and pieces. not sure what's going on with the website and ill-health message etc. but having spoken to them in the past few days about their next project I know they are still around and can be contacted at: theenzodesign@gmail.com
Nope, no tricks or special skills needed. It's just a matter of using the right materials. No time to do a full write up at the moment but it's essentially a silicone glove moulding system with a UV light curing pre-preg glass as a hard shell structure. Very easy to work with and almost no risk of any resin/exotherm damage to the original panels because of the silicone surface. If anyone's worked with silicone they'll know how nice it is to work with. No release issues, it'll peel straight off the oem panels without leaving a mark. No complicated multi-part moulds as silicone can deal with quite complex undercuts. Very easy clean up if there's any excess.
Obviously these won't be used for a set of production moulds but they will be able to make a few sets of panels out of them. Ideally you'd pull a set and fit them to a car before taking your master set of production moulds.
I never said it'd be a cheap way of doing it, but wayyyy cheaper than a respray on an exotic!
im not sure of all the different places to buy these mold materials 8c is talking about but i do know of one place
smooth-on.com
they sell all kinds of silicone based mold materials and foams.
8c is deffinetly right in what he is saying. not to mention the speed in which you can mold something with this stuff. if you cant use something like this. then i would only use epoxy, it shrinks very very little if at all. polyester on the other hand will and that is where you can get damage. even the highest grade of resin like i use will have some shrinkage, even though it is not much it will cause damage. and then the chemicals in the polyester can cause the paint to lift. which has happened to me before. not sure if epoxy would but that is a big chance to take. silicone is the way to go
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