Hi all. I made a CF hood for my car a couple years ago but have never been completely happy with the pin holed results. I would like to try another using infusion with epoxy resin vs. the wet layup vacuum bagged VE I used the first time. I originally used VE because of its higher TG but from all my searching I can't find any mention of people using high temp resins for their hood creations. Is a 180-200F TG high enough for a hood? I could always make an oven for post curing a high temp epoxy but that just adds extra work and cost. What have others been using as an epoxy resin choice and how have they held up? Thanks for any help.

As a general rule of thumb the achievable Tg is determined by the hardener. If you look at a certain resin it will produce different Tg with different hardeners. If you take another resin brand and use the same hardeners with it the ranking will be the same. And slower hardeners will often (not always) produce a higher Tg.

Also look at the MSDS of different hardeners. If you find one which for example consists of isophorone diamine ( http://www.chemspider.com/Chemical-Structure.16867.html ) and nothing else it will produce a Tg of up to 120°C and has a pot life of roughly 90 minutes. Hexane diamine is another good material with a little shorter pot life.

These are pretty common materials but very often you can't get them pure, many of these "resin systems" contain horrible mixtures. "Resin systems", where you have to buy both resin and hardener from the same source are a big lie anyway. You can use resin from manufacturer A with hardener from manufacturer B and tailor the results to suit your needs. You just need to calculate the proper ratio, which isn't too difficult if you can get a real datasheet for the components.

So what I'm trying to say here is you can buy a resin and then use it with the hardener of your choice to achieve the same or better results for less money than many commercially available epoxy "systems" will produce. Or you can copy epoxies that are locally unavailable.

[edit:]
Just had a look at your link. Without having seen the MSDS I am pretty sure that pt5712 stuff contains isophorone diamine...