Wooden body tools

[tonyfoale]

Jon recently posted pix of the first Corvette body patterns. It does not need a large corporation to make similar tools. Here are a couple of examples that I did in the early 1980s.

The QL.
I have no measurable talent for styling so I put the word out on what I was looking for and Dan Parry Williams arrived at my workshop one Saturday morning with this sketch. I had been somewhat disappointed with the efforts of some others who had offered designs. As soon as I saw this sketch I knew that it was the one. Dan and I formed a great partnership turning his sketch into reality, and we have been friends ever since. The finished result follows the original concept very closely, which is often a rarity. I did all the mechanical design which was quite innovative.

Click images for fullscale view.

Construction stages of the pattern, made in the basement bedroom of my house at the time. That allowed evening work on it after returning home from my workshop where I was working on the mechanical stuff. I was working to a self imposed target date to get it on display at a show in London.



Dan was a mechanical engineering student at the time which had the advantage that we had access to a small windtunnel at his college. Here he is at the controls. I made a 1/6 scale model and used an Action Man toy to do the riding. Aerodynamics with practicality was a big part of my concept. We did comparative tests with a standard bike and if memory serves me correctly we had 67% of the drag of the standard machine.



Continued in next post. Too many photos for a single post.