Early cars have only half a cover ! Fot the last 20 years every time I looked at the cover , It made me mad that the PO had cut it in half

 

LOL!!!

 

Jerry. i don't see any "clips". looks like it just snaps under the lip of the ledge. mine had the dumb 2/3 cover

 

What you may need to do is feel along under the front edge of the narrow painted metal cowl piece that fits just below and foreward of the windshield. I expect you will find two or hopefully three clips under there that probably cannot be seen because they are hiding behind the front edge of the narrow metal cowl piece. Try again to see if they are there because there is nothing else there for the plastic cowl cover to fasten onto in the back. Also it might be helpful for you to take your 2/3 cover out and take some pictures of it and post them. Thanks.

Jerry Feather

 

dont have the cover anymore... but i will check for the clips.

 

By the way, I have completed the correction of the forms I am making for these covers and am back on track to getting them ready for the plastics guy to form some for me to see if they are going to work. I still have to fabricate the bases for the forms and then drill all the little air holes in the groves and corners for the air to escape. As tiny as the holes need to be I am sure that drilling several hundred of them is going to take a while. I also have ordered some closed cell foam for the back seal and have some sample of bulb seal trim coming to try to find the correct size we can use to replace the front cowl seal that I see is missing on most of the cars that don't have the cowl cover.

Jerry Feather

 

I finished the cowl cover forms, at least to the point of making a first trial forming. I have given two of them to my plastics guy who is going to do the vacu-forming for me on these. He is going to try to set it up in the next day or two and give me a call to come watch how it works out. If there are no problems then I'll have him order the material we finally decide on (thickness) and have him form a nice batch of these in the tree different versions I have designed. He said that there is always the chance that he simply gives me back my forms with the plastic stuck to them if we cannot figure out how the get the plastic to release. I hope that doesn't happen.

I am really giving a lot of thought to having these done with 16th inch thick ABS plastic in Black, of course, rather than the .040 I had previously been thinking about. I measured the original cover and I think it was made from .030 material and is stretched out to well under .020 in places. I would really like mine to be much more substantial than the originals, so .040 may not give me as much improvement as I was shooting for from the start. I think my forms will work fine with the extra thickness.

I also have some closed cell foam for the seal of the back edge next to the metal cowl trim strip. I have two thicknesses to work with so I think with that we will have a nice snug fit.

I also have found some edge bulb seal to replace what is used along the front edge of these covers and for sealing the engine compartment air out of the cowl area. When I figure out just which size to use I'll order some of that and have it available with the covers.

You can see in the sticker thread that I hope to also have the correct shell stickers and the washer sticker to go on these when they are ready.

Jerry Feather

 

Epic little design project there- looking forward to the outcome.

And, thanks! As someone said not too long ago, t's work like this that will keep our cars going into the future!

 

Jerry, you can't just reverse the pressure through the suction holes and blow the piece off?

 

The basic answer to that is a qualified YES! However, for the first test run(s) the forms will be laying loosely on the top of something below which the vacuum will be introduced called the vacuum box. I'm not sure yet what that will look like.

What it might take to seperate the plastic from the forms then is to release the plastic from the frame holding it, then pick the whole stuck together composite up and blow air into one of the hundreds of tiny air holes I drilled through the forms. That may work for this test event, but it is going to be too labor intensive to do for a production run of say a hundred covers and especially since we sill be forming 4 at a time, so the whole thing will be pretty cumbersom

If we find that the air blow is going to be required and we are going to form 4 covers at a time, I expect to make a plywood base for the four forms that will measure 44 inches square and probably be out of 3/4 inch plywood. Then I'll mount four of the forms to it after I have located fairly large holes under each form for the vacuum to pull the air out. These will be the only holes in the base, so after the covers are formed and cooled the box underneath can be pressurized which will hopefully blow the plastic off the forms. The forms will be screwed to the plywood base, so we will not likely have to wrestle with the forms and the blow gun on a hands-on basis.

I watched the plastics guy's helper do some forming of little cake pan like boxes and that is how it worked. It was pretty effective and the boxes were about 3 to 3 1/2 inches deep and about 5 by 7 or 8 inches in size. They were forming 4 of them in a cluster at each pull and they were using 8th inch ABS. The plastic popped right off with the pressure air. The sides of the box forms were sloped about 5 degrees or so, which helped to prevent the plastic from locking on as it cooled and shrunk.

There are a multitude of shapes with verticle and some angled sides in my forms that are not angled or made with angle relief, However they are not very deep, so I think the release problem is not going to be something we have to deal much with. We will see in a day or two.

Jerry Feather

 

This series of posts may be my last in this thread because if this project keeps working out as it is I will hope to be offering these in my vendor capacity soon. Here are some pictures, in groups of 5 with each post, that show the success we had today in forming some nice heavy duty cowl covers. All that is left now is for me to refine the forms a bit and take them back to the plastic shop for final forming.

We first tried forming them with plastic that is about .060 in thick and that worked pretty good, then we tried .040, and that didn't work as well. Then we went back to the .060 and raised the temperature a bit and they started coming out just great. Here are some pictutres of the process.

 

Here are five more pictures.

 

Wow that's impressive. Nice work Jerry.

 

We didn't have any trouble getting the first two or three pulls off the forms, but when we increased the temperature a bit and got more detail they were more difficult to get off. The changes I need to make in the forms are bascially to angle some edges and round some others and we think that will make them easier to pull off even with the tighter detail we wewre getting at the last pull.

 

I wasn't sure until I posted that last set of pictures that I was able to catch the plastic in the forming process. My camera takes about two to three seconds to make its mind up to take a picture and the plastic forms in about two, so it is hard to catch it in the process.

The last three pictures in this post and the two that will be in the nex and last one show the last of five pulls that we made in comparison to one of the original cowl covders, at least in respect to some of the details. I like mine a lot better.