Well, we looked all over Home Depot, and I couldn't for the life of me find any type of 2x4 that I thought was flexible enough to bend. What we find was this fabulously bendy PVC material that came in 1x4 planks. Doubling up on these gave us the exact dimensions of a 2x4.
In order to figure out the angles at which each of these boards would need to be cut, Sam traced the wheel well and the dimensions of our sill plate material onto a peice of scrap OSB, and then used ~The Power Of Math~ (I'll try to get more details on this process later) to figure out that we needed about a 44-degree cut on each of the end of the 2x4 which would but up against the flexible sill plate, and at both ends of the flexible 1x4s.
A few cuts later and we tested the flexiblility of the PVC board over the wheel wells for the first time. We found that they were a little too stiff to bend. Fortuantely, Joe Coover came to our rescue (again). His flexible material had been slightly too rigid as well, and he found that by scoring one side of it and heating it up, he had been able to bend it over the wheel wells just find. We didn't really have any good method of heating up our PVC, but we could score it, so we figured out how to use the depth-stop on our chop saw and gave it a go.
As you can see here, it worked like a charm and the 1x4s bent over the wheel wells beautifully.
The next step was to figure out where to cut the other end of the flexible boards. I wish we had some really sophisticated method for getting this right, but unfortunately, it was just a big game of guess-and-check for us: one that twice ended up with us cutting a board too short. But by going slowly, shaving down each board by ever smaller amounts and checking the fit after ever cut, we got there.
At the end of the day, I was immensly pround of our work. We bolted the flexible boards to the wheel wells to keep them in place, and we secured the sill plates on either side to keep the boards properly bent. I think it turned out great.
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