But wait, there's more!!


Now to fine tune our dies for the hood brace. Looking at our original profile template, the first upsweep (red arrow) and second upsweep (yellow arrow) are both nearly vertical as compared to the opposite side.





Our first test run shows the first upsweep spread too wide, not enough vertical...





Looking at the die that was made, a bit too much material was removed such that this vertical feature was lost...





So a new die was made for the top, this time out of aluminum. The phenolic is somewhat easy to cut out but does have challenges in making crisp bend details, so lets see if the aluminum helps out..

Next run, this time we'll do two panels in case they work... First pass to draw the metal into the center rib...





This is about 8 passes, each progressively deeper. The circle fixture to the right in the picture (white base) is used as a back stop to keep our rib centered.





This is about 9/16 of depth, so quite a bit of draw.. Next, the new top die is added and goes through the same 8 progressive passes.. Note in the next picture the vertical upsweeps are both nearly vertical. Success!











Matching up to the original, this looks like the right replacement.





video version:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQgVST8TYgE






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