Well, at this point in the build, it has been about three months over the summer. Too many hours to count.
Here is what the inside plate looks like for the tail lights.
After trimming the excess foam away, you can see that I glued the rear plate to the right slightly. I could not tell that this was the case with all the excess foam sticking out past the end plate!
The tail light assemblies and license plate area are both recessed and flush with the end plate surface.
Keeping this "edge" sharp, between the top and side panels took many hours. Here spackling is being added to build-up areas that are low or not sharp.
Here's a view of the other side, showing the sharp angle that being held, to keep the styling line going that Honda put on the Insight.
A view showing how the overall shape is progressing...
Now, I wanted to use LED taillights, but before ordering mass quantities, the bulb intensities needed to be measured first.
This first picture is a standard incandescent brake light bulb behind the reflector. I setup the camera about 20 feet away and zoomed in on the lens to get comparative shots of the incandescent and LED bulbs.
Incandescent in "run" mode
And now in "brake" mode
Now the same pattern with the LED tail light bulb...
You can see that the LED lights are actually brighter, but less diffuse.
Now for something that might be slightly scary, but I was ready to start cutting out pockets for the recessed lighting!! This is the first cut using a rotary tool to cut to a predetermined depth. In fact, the same depth as the acrylic thickness.
A little wood fixture was fabricated to hold the rotary tool at the correct cutting depth.
And, there we go. This recessed surface was then sanded smoother with a custom fit sanding block with glued sand paper attached.
Now deeper pockets are cut for the recessed LED lighting.
And the other side with the same thing...
Parallel tape lines were laid on the concrete floor and used as reference lines to get the side cuts in line with the car body. The wood piece is then used to ensure the pockets are in alignment as well.
Half inch wood dowels were machined to the correct length and center drilled in preparation of the wood screws used to hold the acrylic in place. The dowels are being glued here.
Little wood fixtures were made and then fiberglassed for strength, and shown with one of the light sockets.
While that glass work was setting up, custom cut acrylic was shaped to fit exactly into the cutout. Next several layers of light-weight glass cloth was wetted out and Glad-Wrap was then lined behind the acrylic and used as a mold release.
While all this was going on, the top deck was being built-up with multiple layers of spackling. Why? The flat shape shown earlier in this thread just did not look right to me, and so the decision was made to build up the center by 1/4 inch.
A special foam master template was carved to match this curvature, and used to get the entire surface this same shape. The deck plate took many hours of filling and sanding to get just right.
Jim.