See the Wooden Body Bucks That Created the First Corvette Molds
Before being born in fiberglass, the Corvette began life as finely carved mahogany.
Here, in 2020, it’s easy to take the Corvette’s pioneering use of fiberglass for granted. For over six decades, America’s sports car has been built this way, after all. The Corvette’s continued us of fiberglass and composite material, nearly 70 years later, is the sort of throwaway factoid used in the margins of magazine articles to take up space and spice up the layout.
Back in the Corvette’s early days, though, the Corvette was an entirely new sort of vehicle for GM. As a result, it required new techniques and thinking. There would be no stamping dies, no hammer-and-dolly, and considerably less welding than Chevrolet was used to.
Creating the large molds for the Corvette’s fiberglass parts was an ordeal in and of itself. In the days before CAD, CNC, and 3D printing, all of the hard work of creating the Corvette’s curvaceous body happened by hand.
Mahogany Molds
The wooden body bucks seen here we painstakingly carved by hand, according to Super Chevy. Initially, Chevrolet used them to create molds for the original Motorama show car. Later, they would be instrumental in creating the molds for the production 1953 Corvette.
It’s difficult to comprehend the amount of work that went into each part. As seen here, the carved mahogany seen here made up more than just the outer body shell. Craftsmen also carefully formed the dashboard and underbody from Polynesian mahogany.
Any part that was fiberglass on the production car was carved in this way. A mold was taken from that wooden part. Then, that mold was used to create fiberglass copies, all by hand.
The amount of work that went into a single door or dashboard is impressive in this age of automation. It’s no wonder that just 300 Corvettes were produced in 1953, with the last one leaving the Flint, Michigan factory on Christmas Eve of that year.
When they were no longer useful for Corvette production, Chevrolet destroyed these functional works of art. It’s a real shame that we will never see these carved, sanded, lacquered, and polished body bucks sitting in the National Corvette Museum. Thankfully, we have these photos.
Photos: Super Chevy
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