"Finished" pic first,here it is mocked up with clear shipping tape, and the overall shape looks fantastic. I get big time retrofuture vibes. After pictures I'll go through my difficulties, and finally possible solutions.
With the shape of the car's natural "hips" and that flattened pod behind the rear wheels, this looks amazing. reminds me of a lot of solar car concepts.
A view down the side of the car, showing how much wheel well is shielded. The leading edge of the cover still needs some adjusting and attention.
A look at the trailing edge. You can see it's warped from where I applied the heat gun a little too aggressively. This was a good learning experience.
This gap and the difficulty in making these panels meet satisfactorily makes me want to reconsider the "depth" of the skirt.
Alright so on to things I learned from this experience.
ABS is a b**** to shape precisely with nothing more than a heat gun. I found my best results by heating the front side and leaning on/bending the area I wanted to be bent against the nonflammable concrete floor of our garage. Got good results in some places, but nowhere near close enough in others. Vacuum forming is definitely the way to go here, but I don't have the motivation nor the money nor the time to make a vac form machine, even though DIY ones are possible.
Using metal rasps and files works
A M A Z I N G for shaping edges. It's time consuming, but necessary---cutting an exact template from cardboard, then exactly tracing that on the ABS was really challenging and nigh on impossible. Therefore going back over the edges and shaping and shaping and shaping was inevitable.
I may have gone too "deep" with my initial template. I think I will look into cutting this one a little shorter top-to-bottom and making up the remainder with something flexible like a stiffened rubber. Cutting it a bit shorter will greatly reduce the compound bends I otherwise have to put in.
Here's some high-tech deepfakery to demonstrate what I'm talking about, the gray representing a flexible material like the rubber you'd find under the edges of semi-truck trailer wings. Assuming I can source some. Might cut it even higher up than that.
Anyway that's about all I've got for this post. It was a solid learning experience. I plan on making an updated template by using some posterboard and tracing this ABS mockup---then going ahead and cutting a bunch off of this current piece to see how it looks. I've got enough plastic to make 3-4 more so I still have some wiggle room.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated. Thanks for stopping by!