Vented

The Stylus came to me with three "shark gill" type vents on each front wing, they are rakishly angled to the front, but to give the vents some depth (make it look as if the holes were flanged inward), the original builder had glued MDF to the inside of each wing, cut out the holes & sprayed it all blue. This probably looked great at the time, but 25 years later the MDF has cracked & doesn't look good at all.

So what to do. When I bought the car I just got rid of the mesh that was falling off the inside & replaced it with the small weave stuff you can see in the pic & not really having a clue beyond that, I left it. Shark gills? I had bigger fish to fry.

It was a similar story with the tail lights, but then I thought of re-setting them inside the body with a 3D printed silver lip, I've been astonished at how well this has worked, so it started me thinking & what I thought was something round the vents to match the tail light bezels.

So I drew something using "OnShape", a free cloud-based CAD system.

Then, because I wasn't sure & because I can, I tried out three on a representative background.

I liked it, so I printed a prototype, tested it, made a few changes & printed three for the near side of the car, with three very thin polyurethane gaskets to sit between the trim & the paintwork, I did this with the tail lights & while they hardly show, they make the thing look far more "finished".

With the prints done, one was a good fit, one fitted nicely at the bottom, but swung out at the top, one was loose, so I needed a way of holding all three in place while the glue cured. As is so often the case, two bits of wood &  ratchet strap worked rather well.

So the passenger side is all blinged up, the trims for the driver's side are on the printer even as I type.