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Building Miniature Car Bodies

12:43
49:56
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At 12:43 in

Leonard Wood's Workshop: Half Size Holley Carb and Ford 429 Hemi Project! (Wood Brothers Racing)

What happens here

Leonard proudly displays two half-scale car bodies of a 1971 Mercury, one in an unfinished steel state and the other as a completed aluminum shell. He explains the laborious process of hand-forming the body panels by shaping the metal over a full-size car, cutting, welding, and then refining the two halves to achieve perfect symmetry and detail.

Goal: Showcase the hand-fabrication of half-scale car bodies from metal.

Tools and materials

  • Half-Scale 1971 Mercury Aluminum Body — Demonstrating the final result of intricate bodywork
  • Half-Scale 1971 Mercury Steel Body — Showing the initial stages of metal forming
  • Aluminum sheet metal — Raw material for the car body
  • Steel sheet metal — Raw material for the car body

What they say

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see he takes it on a turntable, he grades it and he cuts a groove in the cam so that it's the correct timing on all of them. This will not be easy. But he is simply amazing. It seems like there's nothing easy about this. He just did these pull-ups. ? Is n't that beautiful? Yes, that's right. This is extremely beautiful. This is the '71 American , driven by David Pearson. Well, I had made some with fiberglass bodies, and Eddie wanted me to make an aluminum one. So I took the steel, I made it , I worked on it, I shaped it, and then you take a thin aluminum sheet and you hand-form it over one half, then the other half , you weld them together—and you get the result. This is interesting. I would never have thought of it. And , of course, there will be windshield mounts. Right now it's just pasted in, but I'll do something else. And there will be a rear window. And to do that—it has to be chrome around the glass. And I have this little tool that gives shape. Then you scrape it like this . And you just keep cutting. And that creates this. Wow. without any welding. So, you made this tool yourself? Ha? Did you make this tool yourself? Oh yes. What other tools

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