Custom Hood and Grill Part 2

It 's time to start working on the latching mechanism for the new hood.  A new structure needs to be fabricated to hold the new latch.  

Chris cleaned up the lip and straighten it 90 degrees to the hood. Add a nice recess and a support for the latch.

Latch installed. The bottom part of the latch will be incorporated to the top part of the grill shell.

Working on making a mock up of the grill shell out of wood to get a visual of size and spacing  of the bars. We are trying to achieve the look of the earlier 36 Ford grill but on a bigger scale.

Started out with the out side grill surround with 3/4" plywood and made the grill bars out of 3/8 " plywood.

Started with the center and work our way out. We did our math and figured out the spacing  for the grill bars. I ask Chris if he would make me some jigs for the spacing, but he informed me that jigs don't work well for this type of spacing. But he humored me and made me the jigs. So now I'm on a mission to make these jigs work. I'm taking my time laying out the grill bars on the bottom piece and it comes out right at this point I'm filling pretty good. I then start to layout the top and it turned out good too. Now I start to assemble the pieces together and it is looking really good till I get to the end and bottom one has space for two grill bars and the top has only one. So yes jigs do not work for making precision measurements.  

What does make precision measurements is a milling machine with a digital read out computer. Lucky I have a great friend that loves cars and had some time to help us out.  And yes he has a milling machine. Thank You Paul.

Here"s the finish grill. This turned out way better then I ever expected. Chris wants to use it as wall art for the shop after were done.

We only want to make one adjustment to the grill. instead of 3/4" surround we will be using 1/4".

All I can say is I can't wait to see it in metal and all shiny.