FS: Clear Engine Covers from the AEM 818R SEMA Build

[SixStar]

Well, SEMA is over and the cat is out of the bag. Yes we had a clear engine cover on our 818R for the show. The cover was painstakingly made by myself, Brandon and formed at FormTite Inc. in Denver, Colorado.

It will withstand engine temperatures, sun, etc just fine and could be used daily with some reinforcements or just for shows as is.

We had three covers made and I would rank them Decent, Good, and flawless. The Good cover is the one that was in the show. It was damaged at SEMA but it's only a tiny crack and could be fixed (cut around) or just dealt with.

Now, because our car is an R this is a 100% custom part that will need either some modification or enhancements to fit any other car. I'll just let the pictures do the talking and answer questions from there.

Thanks, Keith

http://imgur.com/a/g61OM#0

[metalmaker12]

I want one for S, what's the price to do it.

[SixStar]

I want one for S, what's the price to do it.

You really don't want to know. For the price of these three I could have bought a decent sport bike. Pile on top of that another week of labor to make the mold. Safe to say I will never do this again.

[Jaime]

I'm surprised. I see Star Wars geeks vacuum forming Storm Trooper costumes all the time. They all claim to have spent very little money and on the order of tens of hours for parts about as complex as that hatch.

[Mechie3]

They might have started from an existing form. Clear parts are harder to get made plus the size of the machine means costs grow exponentially.

[Jaime]

Take a look (http://www.trooperarmor.com/).

I don't doubt that Keith spent way more than he thinks anyone will pay for his. Even at the low end of what I said a few posts up, 20 hours is still well over a thousand dollars in labor. You would have to sell quite a few of them to make it commercially viable. I was hoping he knew a vacuum forming company that could duplicate an existing part cheaply.

But, one passionate 818 owner might be willing to put in the time to make a master that fits an unmodified 818S. Then, he could probably make enough profit to buy a set of tires. Then again, I think a person could take a side job raking leaves and make better money.

[metalmaker12]

You really don't want to know. For the price of these three I could have bought a decent sport bike. Pile on top of that another week of labor to make the mold. Safe to say I will never do this again.

I figured it was nutty!!

[longislandwrx]

vin diesel approves.

35614

[SixStar]

All valid points. The size of the machine indeed does dictate the cost. This one is large enough to do most of the 818 panels. It took up about 500 ft^2 or so and had a pit for the mechanism to push the panel up into the material.

One thing I didn't mention is that they weigh almost nothing, I'll get numbers today.

Preparation was a nightmare as was returning the panel to its former condition. The entire part needs to be braced so it doesn't crush, then you have to drill about 100 0.020 holes in the panel for air to come though. I'd post pictures but I recently had a HDD crap out and lost everything from the build, oh well.

Starting from scratch on a virgin S cover I could get them made for about $2500 all said and done with the 'donor' panel coming back to the owner with those tiny holes I mentioned. We've discussed it and I think we could let these panels go for $300 for the decent, $400 for the good (the trimmed to fit panel), and $600 for the flawless. They could ship pretty easy in a hood box and won't be heavy but will be oversized via UPS.

[MrDude_1]

what material is that? Polycarbonate?

[SixStar]

what material is that? Polycarbonate?

I honestly never asked. I'll see if I can get an answer. I always assumed it was Acrylic or Polypropylene.

[Goldwing]

If your computer motherboard has another hard drive slot, look into drive mirroring. You can set it up so that everything that is written to one drive, also gets written to the other drive too (mirror images of each other). Slows things down a tiny bit, but when a hard drive dies, you swap in another one and the computer gets busy rebuilding the failed drive's info onto the replacement drive. Helps prevent total loss of your info. Some motherboards can do it, but otherwise windows 7 and up can do it in the operating system. Maybe an earlier OS as well, that's when I heard about it. For what it's worth anyway.

[Goldwing]

You may also come across "striping" if you look into it. Same technology, entirely different purpose. Striping spreads the info across two drives to speed up the computer by sharing the writing between two drives. Some of each file is on drive A, the rest on drive B. But if either drive fails, you lose it all. You want "mirroring" where each drive has all the info.

[SixStar]

You may also come across "striping" if you look into it. Same technology, entirely different purpose. Striping spreads the info across two drives to speed up the computer by sharing the writing between two drives. Some of each file is on drive A, the rest on drive B. But if either drive fails, you lose it all. You want "mirroring" where each drive has all the info.

It's an old Dell M90 I use here at the shop for personal/forum/picture stuff. It's no great loss. The car exists, that's proof enough.