 So...I'm an over-achiever.I draw different things in CAD when I don't need to, but I think the more examples you have of your work, the better. I think that is how I got this job. I was notified by the Workforce Development Center at Penn College about a project that I might be interested in doing. If it was anything else I would have said no, but it was just too cool of a project to turn down.
-  So I started working on a quote. If you have never quoted a project before, you should know, it is a very difficult thing to do. It is especially hard if you have never done it before. It was a little easier knowing that noone else was competing for the project, but it was still a hard task. It was made even more difficult after I was told that the school would only pay me a certain amount, no matter what work I did or how hard it was. After weeks and weeks of usual college paced progress, I was finally cleared to start the work. -
History
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Most people are familiar with the Shelby Cobra, and what a great car it is/was, but when Shelby wanted to race against the Ferraris overseas, the Cobra hit an obstacle. The obstacle, was air.
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The Cobra was a great race car in America, on American circuits which were short and where only about 5% of the lap was driven at top speed. The Cobra was great here, but in Europe was a different story. The tracks were longer and much more time was spent at top speed. This showed the Achilles heel of the Cobra, which was its terrible aerodynamics.
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There were many attempts at making the car more aerodynamic. First Shelby tried just angling the windscreen back to reduce drag, but that wasn't the solution. They also tried to put a top on the car, but to no avail. They would need another solution. The solution was to create a totally new body for the cobra, and with that solution was the birth of the Daytona Coupe.
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Getting Started
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After finally getting all the paperwork, forms, and background checks completed it was finally time to start work. I met with the client (I am going to be vague with names/businesses so that I don't anger anyone) and we talked about what I would need and how we would go about modeling the car. The best way I could see to do it was in the reverse order of how Pete Brock, the original designer of the car, did it. But first I had to read how he did it.
 One of my co-workers lent me a book that documented the complete life of the daytona coupe. It has been a great help to see exactly how the car was built initially. The book is called Daytona Cobra coupes: Carroll Shelby's 1965 world champions. It is actually written by Pete Brock. The book details exactly how the Coupe was designed and built.
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Brock started with a 1/4 scale drawing of the car. With those drawings he made plywood cross-sections at various points, this arrangement of plywood cross-sections is known as a buck. The body was then made from those sections. So what I'm going to do is take measurements from the body, to make different cross-sections. Then I'll take those cross-sections and loft a surface through all of them and produce a 3D model of the body of the Coupe.
- When I started the project, one of the first things I got was a copy of the 1/4 scale drawing. The drawing has the standard 4 views of a car, and also has around 10 different sections of the car. The original drawings that Brock had produced gave a rough shape of the car. From those sections I roughly sketched the profiles to derive the model pictured, but more information was needed to get a full model of the body. More trips to the shop are needed to obtain the points needed to make the profiles, to make the surface, to make the car. |
Contact |
The Process |