Who Needs a Front Grille Badge? We do!
So in my effort to spruce up my car I came across the S402 Legacy. One of the cosmetic accoutrements it had was the S402 badge on the front grille.
Custom Front Badge
I thought a bit about making my own badge. I got quite into MightCarMods YouTube channel and liked the idea of sleepers: I was thinking about printing and chrome (or nickel?) plating my own Sleeper (SLPR) badge but decided:
- Putting a ‘Sleeper’ badge on your sleeper invalidates it’s being one. A paradox?
- My car is hardly a sleeper. It is not a Beetle that I increased the BHP tenfold on nor is it a Mini with a Honda super bike engine in it. At best I am currently running on a 10% increase and an environmental and legislation headache.
The GT Badge
During my trip down to Pick-A-Part, to find some C-post speaker covers, I also pried off a GT logo, but have since debated whether to bother sticking it on the front grille or not. There was also a Bilstein Shocks badge too, but my efforts to pry that off ended up in tearing my Auckland Hop Card in half.
I think it would look alright, but I dunno. I stuck it on with a bit of Blu-Tak as a mock-up and it looked a little “Meh”. I think what bothers me a little is that is looked like a cardboard cutout. I’ve been looking around at other manufacturers who do it (only Audi and VW it seems). Some of them are a little better integrated: they have a boss/ mount behind as part of the grille which makes the badge a little more permanent and supposed-to-be-there.
I decided that IF I do mount the GT badge, it has got to look ‘proper’. I wondered if I could 3D print a mount. The complexity with this would be integrating it with the honeycomb pattern of the grille.
This spurred the question: How can I model the geometry of the grille honeycomb?
The 3D model below is the first hit at one option. I took ~10 photos with my Canon DSLR and used Autodesk ReCapture. Pretty good as a muck around I thought, though the texture is doing a lot of work in making it look good. For my second run, I’ll pick a dry day (I don’t think the rain drops help in what I am trying to do, but they look good) and I’ll take a lot more photos: I think I can probably get something decent.