Back in the 80's when this truck was worked on, the side fender emblems and the hood emblem were removed and the holes were welded shut.
SInce I'm trying to build somewhat of a sleeper project, I have no problem having the side fender and the hood emblems back in place. I've looked at the replacement emblems in the catalogs, for some reason they didn't fit my bulid. Not physically but the theme I'm going for.
I've had an idea of making my own but didn't know exactly where I wanted to head with the idea. I knew I wanted to be around 18" long and about 2 1/2" high, similar to the originals. Now what design? How do I fill this space? What material do I use? ect, ect.
I focused on a big oval shape, now what to fill the oval with? Then I thought the engine size, 396 would look great. I sat at the computer for hours then I had an idea. This first idea was going to be 3 layers. A base, an oval design then the 396.
The oval design and the numerals would be tack welded from the backside to the base. Similar to how this picture looks assembled.
Although this fills the need I still have issues. It is made of plain steel, I'd have to have it chromed. What a pain it would be to arrange all the pieces then weld them. Anyway, it just got complicated.
Life lesson.... this is the point to where many would throw in the towel. Every project we build is going to have these road blocks, it is how we handle these road blocks that determine what we will end up with when done.
Back to the drawing board for me. I need something that will be one cut, no welding, no layers.
I settled on stainless steel, I stayed away up to this point because I could polish the top but I had no way of polishing the inner crevises. Then I let my brother know about it and he metioned electro-polishing stainless. Yes, this I will try.
I redesigned the emblem. I have the oval, I have the 396 I have the 18" long plus I used the idea of an arrow to support the numbers to rest of the emblem. I like the arrow since the original word back in '57 was apache, I figured the arrow would ok.
Here it is, the passenger side, not polished yet.
I wasn't sure how this was going to turn out, otherwise I would have welded the mounting screws before I did the cleaning to this point.
I then sent it off for the electro polishing. The electro polishing did great in all the crevices. I could have spent a little more time getting rid of some of the fine surface scratches on the top facing before electro polishing, under some lighting I could see fine scratches, I took 2000 grit paper to the top surface only then buffed and hand polished.
I'm happy but I might want to go with a thicker material. The main point is, I broke down a barrier and expanded my abilities. I laid it on the front fender of a Willys truck to give some idea if the size of the emblem.
After this last picture I block sanded the emblem and repolished to get a near perfect surface. The joy is not being restricted to only buying polished cosmetics for my builds anymore.