Dennis S. and I do need the stencil bridges but I did not want to take any more of your time. I was working on them using a system of adding points and deleting lines. I just tried your white box with divide method and it works much faster.
As I wanted to tweak the placement of the bridges and I can do that now. If anyone else has a better photo of an original stencil painted by the car co. I could really use that as a reference.
Thanks so much for your help on this.
I'll try and get a good photo posted when we finish the car.

Buzz

Sounds great! I'm not sure how familiar you are with Illustrator but when I do pathfinder divide method, I'll occasionally switch over to outline mode (Command Y) on a Mac. Not sure what it is on PC. Outline mode lets you get a better view on errant invisible junk paths that may be left over.

Cheers and good luck with your project. I'd love to see it when completed.

-Eric Capers