New Windscreen Brow Mould

This week saw the arrival of our new Spitfire Mk.IX Windscreen Brow mould. That’s the clever little curved glass screen that sits above the Armoured Windshield.

Our previous mould was very nice but did not survive the journey by ship to Ireland, the MDF base having picked up moisture and developed a hairline crack in the finish. Not serious, but enough to create a light mark on the vacuum pulled clear acrylic.

Hairline crack visible on original mould

It presented an ideal opportunity to relook the original design and see if improvements could be made. We were assisted in this by Brett, one of our build license holders who also runs an amazing prototyping and restoration outfit near Melbourne, Australia called RRET (Restoration Reverse Engineering Technologies). Brett has an original complete windscreen and did a scan for us by which we were able to make a comparison of our design to the original.

Brett’s build with original Spitfire MkIX windscreen

While there is obviously some difference in functionality between a wartime cast armoured window and a replica for an Augmented Virtuality cockpit, the scan proved the accuracy of our design.

As a result we were able to refine our design before having a new mould made.

We commissioned a specialist tool and die maker in the UK to fashion a new one out of aluminium. This was cast in rough form before being CNC machined and mounted. The result is a work of art.

The finished new brow mould

The mould has been sent to our vacuum forming supplier and we are very excited to see the result in acrylic in the next week or two!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

twenty − 3 =

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.