Thanks guys. The last week has seen various attempts at replicating the oil cooler shown above. There have been four fails and the 5th is now underway and may yet join the others in the bin.
Many years ago, I had kept a brochure of actual stainless steel filter mesh material samples ranging from extremely fine to very coarse. One of these may have proved to be ideal but I don't know what the heck happened to the brochure. Plan A would have been to use one of these sample meshes. After scouring my work area and rummaging through all my spare boxes, I gave up on trying to find it so went to plan B.
The first stage was to cut back the moulded-in cooler to make a raised surface onto which a scratch built unit would would be glued. Below you can see this done along with a separate piece of cut styrene sheet with a number of vertical grooves cut into it.
Plan B entailed gluing this piece of styrene in place and then adding numerous horizontal bits of stretched sprue to represent the cooling fins. Below you can see the base glued on before adding the sprue. I got about 20% done and decided that this was not working out as it was hard to get the sprue bits to stay straight and maintain a consistent spacing as I glued them on so I gave up on this attempt. I thought wrongly that I got a picture of this before chucking it but, believe me, it didn't look the part so it was on to plan C
Plan C was to try and make the fins by softening a pics of styrene sheet with Tamiya Extra Thin and pressing it onto a file to crate the fins (below). Close inspection showed a very irregular pattern so this idea was also discarded.
Plan D - take a piece of Scotch Tape, stick it to the cutting mat with masking tape so that the sticky side is up, and stick on pieces of copper wire. Once these were on, the whole thing was doused with thin CA to make a sheet from which to cut the part
This was looking promising so I added the oil line and glued it on...but....
...after painting it, I hated how this turned out. So that part was binned and I went on to plan E.
Plan E is the one now in the spotlight. I went back to the idea of using the file as a mould and this time stuck on some Aluminum foil tape and burnished it down firmly. I then pealed the tape off and stuck it to some styrene sheet:
After cutting it to size and adding the curve, it looks like this:
Though the pattern is a bit course, this could be "The Chosen One". A coat of primer will be squirted on before I take a final look and make a decision.
All the foregoing to show you that I've not been sitting on my ass doing nothing.