Second Attempt: Metal Skin Fabrication

This time I started with an easier strategy, to fabricate half of the skin first, this allows me to have easier control on the sheet metal.

I started by cutting out a semi-slightly deformed ellipse, then I drew the streamline feature on the skin, the pen marks are still on the model. After this, I started to stretch the metal along the line by hammering from inside. When the metal started to curve, I then further fold the metal along the line to create the streamline feature. The process was slow and long, requires a lot of shrinking and stretching, but the result is encouraging, you can see the obvious streamline from the images.

The Skin Fits Well to the Template

Besides of fabricating the streamline feature, making the skin fitting to the template is extremely hard. Every time I try to make the streamline more obvious, the bottom part of the skin starts to straighten, which makes it very hard to fit onto the template. I had to do a lot of shrinking on the top part of the skin, and stretching the bottom of the skin, and this requires extremely careful balance.

First and Second Attempt Comparison

Although the second attempt is much better than the first one, the skin is still not perfect fit to the template. Also, there are a lot of hammer marks and blemishes on the surface of the skin, which makes it less aesthetic. I hope my next attempt, which is the second half of the skin, will be much more accurate and with finer details.