Hi everybody,

I am new to this forum and actually wanted to post this topic in the projects section but I am not allowed to create a new topic there. So hopefully it is ok to post it in this section.

Coming to my project, I plan to build myself a play boat similar to this out of carbon fiber.



For this project I want to make a two part mould one for the upper and one for the lower part of the boat (not sure how to make the coaming yet). For the lamination I want to try the resin infusion method to get a perfect surface finish and strength of the parts. The traditional way of making a carbon fiber or glass fiber kayak is to laminate the upper and lower part of the boat and then gluing (laminating) both halves together. But this brings some problems with it

1. aligning both halves is not easy (more work)
2. the transition will always be visible
3. not sure about the strength of the parts at the transition


Nevertheless I found a manufacturer on the net that is able to produce a kayak in one piece. This gives several advantages.

1. Less work afterwards because you don’t have to laminate anything together, and you get a perfect transition.
2. Improved stability of the boat - I guess.

Of course they don’t show how to do that because this is their secret and personal knowledge
Luckily I could capture some pics out of a video that shows the process of separating the mould from the boat.




After I have seen that a few questions came to my mind.

1. How is this process done? How do they stack the carbon layers inside the mould
2. it looks like they somehow managed to paint the boat already inside the mould. My thought on this is that they use some kind of graphic layer that the laminate together with the carbon fiber. Because they also have   more complex designs (see below), that’s why I think it wasn’t done with a regular paintjob. And furthermore, how would you paint it inside the mould?

 

Thank you in advance and I am looking forward to get some answers to my questions.