One-off functional body panels?

"BaconSandwich is tasty." (baconsandwich) 07/07/2015 at 10:11 • Filed to: None

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This recent article over at Ars Technica got me thinking:

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How are body panels for a car like this made? They seem functional, and they seem very well shaped. Creating a set of stamps/dies for a single car seems like it would cost a ton. Are body panels like this shaped by hand, or do you think they use something like a CNC machine to mill them out, or mill out some molds and make them out of fiberglass? Or would something like this be done entirely by hand, either panel beating or tons of sanding and Bondo?

OPPOsaurus WRX > BaconSandwich is tasty. 07/07/2015 at 10:15

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I think a lot of it is one-off leading to the high cost of prototype cars.

Alfalfa Romeo > BaconSandwich is tasty. 07/07/2015 at 10:19

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Generally the same way they make other body panels, and yes it does cost a pretty penny. But for a car like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some fiberglass molding in there as well.

phenotyp > BaconSandwich is tasty. 07/07/2015 at 10:56

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The answer is a combination of all of the above. Generally starting with the full-sized clay, which is milled roughly then hand-refined, scanned, refined further in 3D, then milled again from the data. Repeat and refine as necessary (and with something like this, probably a few rounds in the wind tunnel). Take the final scanned data and mill tooling (soft-tooling, i.e., short-run tools are generally aluminum—lower production cost, shorter life) for panel production. There are tradeoffs in scale— short-run stuff involves a ton of individual hand work, which means high cost-per-part, but they’re not spending the giant amounts of money that they’d spend for large-run (low cost/part) production. They’re probably all CF panels, since that’s a big part of what BMW’s about, these days.

Something like this is used for lots of R&D, which pays off in other ways in series production, so the effort, if done right, is worth it.

Twingo Tamer - About to descend into project car hell. > BaconSandwich is tasty. 07/07/2015 at 11:31

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Many different ways. From 3d printed sand casts for tooling, to plain old fibreglassing over a mould.

Shour, Aloof and Obnoxious > BaconSandwich is tasty. 07/07/2015 at 17:43

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Didn’t the 3rd gen MR2 use bolt on panels? I seem to recall that being a notable thing about that model.

BaconSandwich is tasty. > Shour, Aloof and Obnoxious 07/07/2015 at 20:18

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Certainly quite possible. I can’t say I know off the top of my head.