I'm looking to do a little fab work on my Mustang. I've loved the look of my CDC aggressive chin since I installed it, but I've always wanted to put in a lower grille for a couple reasons

1) Protect the AC condenser
2) give the front a finished look (think it makes the car look/feel really cheap when you can see straight thru into the wheel well and outside)
3) Need to flatten out the wavy part of the lower inlet. A grille with some sort of surround would help flatten them out. Take a close look at the pics below:







I've sketched out a couple ideas I could do to make this happen, but I need to figure out what materials I could make this out of. Acrylic sheet? Lexan? Plexiglass? If anyone has ANY ideas, please let me know. I need something that's relatively strong, won't get too brittle in winter and can be shaped with a little persuasion and a heat gun.

 

For a better idea of what I'm trying to do:

 

I finished my paper template and roughed out a cardboard one too.




The taper on the inlet is a lot more extreme than I realized, so you can see how much more the material has to curve. As it sits, I would need a single 30"x70" sheet to make it in one shot. They definitely sell them, but they run around $100 a piece.

Now, if I make it a top half and a bottom half instead of it looping around to the top in one piece, then it only requires two 48x10 sheets. Hell, I could get enough for that from Home Depot for $35 )not sure how good that would be for my purposes:

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Veranda-1...ZWS1/203836508

 

If I go the 2-piece route, I might have to go w/ brake ducts to help reinforce the corners:

 

Well, I finally got around to trying out my plastic idea. It's not as easy as I thought it'd be. It definitely will shape with a little heat gun persuasion. But it dissipates QUICK, which makes it pretty much impossible to do this freehand:




So I need to do this a different way. I can either make a form to bend the plastic around, OR, I can try to build a mold and pour resin.

I'm thinking I can use this stuff to make either one. Anyone know how it reacts to plastic cling wrap? If it doesn't eat it, I can mask off the car in clingwrap and use the foam to make a negative mold.

 

Got some feedback from other forums and spray foam would definitely eat plastic wrap and probably would ruin the car.

I picked up a used Kinect sensor (from an XBOX 360) for $20 and tried out Scanect. Not sure if this is going to be accurate enough. I was thinking I could build a CAD model and then send it off to get 3d printed.