By nmicro - 1/15/2014 5:49:52 PM
After a lot of tests i was able to finish my first carbon fibre part.
Even with this part, i have to change the layers setup as you will understand later on.
A friend requested a carbon fibre dashboard for his Classic Mini. I had a template of the part, with the cut's for the gauges and so i started.
As it was a simple part an flat so i just used a glass door of my shop. Cleaned the glass and applied 2 coats of Easylease.
To get that mirror look and get some UV protection i decided to put some GC50 gelcoat.
The GC50 was brushed. As it was curing i started to have some doubts. It started to create some fish eyes
Still i went foward.
Next step, laying the carbon fibre. I have in stock some 200gr profinish and some 450gr 3k twill.
My first idea was to put 1 layer of profinish and 3 layer of 450 gr, but i was thinking the part would be damaged by the gelcoat, so there was no need to waist so much epoxy resin.
That said i did 5 profinish layer and about 240 gr of epoxy resin (the part was 1,30 x 1,00 mt).
I still struggle a bit to get the right calculation of the resin consumption, considering the peelply, the flow media, the resin hose inlet, etc.
The temperature at the shop is not the best for Epoxy infusion (around 15ºC)
I stack the carbon, some silicone peel ply and flow media and "closed" everything with the vacuum bag.
Because of the low temperature, the resin took a while to infuse. I heated a bit using a heat gun, but still it took around 20 min to infuse everything.
One advantage of using a glass as a "mould" is that you can see if the bottom is impregnated with resin
after 2 days curing under vaccum (-1,003 bar according to my SMC vacuum switch) it was time to "demould".
I was very happy with the final result. The 5 layers of profinish turned out to be 1,2mm thickness part.
It was very glossy with no need for sanding at all.
After the cuts it was ready.
In close inspection, you could see those gelcoat fish eyes, but the resin fill them up quite nice
In the photo you can see the GC is a bit blueish, but at naked eye you don't see anything
Any comments and future recommendations will be appreciated.
Cheers
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By Fasta - 1/17/2014 6:17:15 AM
I have also just done a similar flat dash panel on glass door.
This was waxed glass with sprayed clear gel coat, wet layup epoxy and this come out great.
For something so simple the wet layup is far easier and you get more of a 3D look weave as the fibres are not vac pressed against the mould.
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