New guy to carbon fibre and the forum


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dr3bin
dr3bin
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Hey everyone,

I'm new to carbon fibre. Took an interest after looking through Carbon Mods and watching their videos, so I thought I'd give skinning a go as I have a few parts I'd like to carbon-fibre up

I have (what I class as) a 'fairly simple' shape. A spark plug cover for my car. First time I've ever skinned anything, so I knew it'd mess it up. Which I did. A load of times. However the finished product finally came out and it looks like this;



The major issues I have is the finish is rubbish. I didn't go up the grades of sandpaper long enough and you can see fine lines. There's little white dots in the resin which I believe are air bubbles. Hammering it with a low-temp heat gun didn't get rid of all the air, so it appears. Also the resin became contaminated as I re-used a brush (washed and soaked in acetone) with fresh resin for the final layer, but the resin dried as a complete fog instead of nice and clear. So about 8 hours of sanding pursued to get it to a semi-finished state, as above. You can kind of see the fogged resin along the bottom of the part. I've learnt from that to use a new brush for each layer.

However, my main gripe is how on earth do I prep the carbon fibre cloth to accommodate the bolt holes. On the above example, I skinned the part, done all the resin layers before drilling the holes through - starting with a small drill bit and working my way up. But, this messed it up as the part eventually chipped around the edges resulting in a poor finish, rather than leaving it with a nice edge to work on with a file to get a nice, flat edge. Took me about 30 minutes of drilling as I knew to take it slowly and carefully. 

I tried cutting the fabric prior to laying the resin, however this frayed the cloth and put it all out of alignment with itself. I can't re-use the part as the fabric is bonded to the part so I binned it

I'm getting pretty annoyed with this process as I want to get this part perfect so I can sell it to my car club. I know I can do it, I'm just missing knowledge that a training course or other, experienced people would be able to offer. Thus me joining up on here Smile

Any advice would be greatly appreciated
GO

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