Trying to find a practical way to replicate the scaled down kool shade material for the engine vents. Here I took my sawblade and taped a piece of styrene down to it and used the lip on the miter box as a backstop for the blade so I could make multiple passes and keep the saw teeth lined up in the grooves on each pass. I pretty much worked, of coarse it really depends on the saw blade you use and the tooth spacing. My blade is kinda old so some of the teeth have been knocked back a bit I assume. Perhaps a cleaner result would come from using a new blade? Might try it out and see.
I feel the scale is right, and if I did 5 or so strips I would probably get one that doesn't have any tooth crossover and get really even clean results. The main issue I see with this is adding the 8 vertical strips and making them look correct, I saw some .5mm strip styrene but I feel that is still too thick and would visually overpower the horizontal lines made by the saw blade.
Anyways gonna keep at it a bit more with this and see if it ends up being usable. Promising at least! Would love to hear how anyone else has solved for this.
I tried modeling it into a mesh that could be printed but the shapeways site gave me mesh errors on those areas as I guess they were too small, gonna try again with a different modeling technique to get a cleaner mesh, so maybe that could work still.
going to 3D print the rings at least and add the square styrene boxes to them so the detail stays sharp, also I will need to do a bit of sanding on the printed part to get it smooth so I left the little boxes off to make sanding easier.
This is the mesh I made to have printed but the grilling was too fine I guess for the software, It's a bunch of little tubes smashed together so I'm gonna try to model it out as a contiguous surface and see if that helps.