This will be a pretty short update. Just a few pictures of the center exhaust area on the roll pan and a few more of the bumper process.
The first thing I did was shape up a simple section of roll pan to span straight across the exhaust opening (not worrying about the oval) After that was shaped to math the body and the existing side portions of the roll pans already fabricated I rough cut out the center oval.
I bent up an oval opening around a template with a 90 deg. flange. I temporarily tapped this into the hole I cut in the center roll pan.
Once the center oval opening was roughly in place, I was able to start shaping up the lower half (technically 1/4 since it's only one side of the oval I guess) Here it's roughly taking shape......
This is after a bit more refinement and it's also been trimmed and tacked to the center oval opening and the previous simple section of center roll pan I used as a basis to build from.
This view also sort of shows that the oval isn't just flat from the side. It has a radius to it up and down. Not as drastic as the bottom of the roll pan, but enough to just give it some contour.
With all the pieces roughed out close enough, it was time to weld them all into one. This would make fine tuning everything easier....it was just a handful with so many panels not welded together previously.
After cleaning up the welds and doing some more metal work. It's not perfect yet....but it's certainly close enough to get ready to fit and weld to the corner sections of the roll pan. From there I can do any minor tweaking and adjusting to get it a bit better.
With the center exhaust opening in place it basically completed the overall look of that area. The only exception was the missing center portion of the bumper. I bent up some heavier pieces to match the Corvette bumpers and trimmed and tacked it to each bumper half. We now have one bumper!
A view looking down and the bumper. I just made the center section straight and then made some relief cuts to get the gentle radius of the body as needed later.
A 3/4 view of the bumper and roll pan area.
And a side view to finish up with.