I'm struggling to get a good mould from a race seat that i have, and I'm hoping you can give me some advice and help.

This race seat is an infuse carbon part, but it has some metal insert on booth sides, to fix it to the car, making it impossible to make a "direct" mould of it.
I believe that this metal parts are glued with some epoxy glue, so it's literally impossible to remove them.

The metal plates have around 2 ~ 2,5mm thickness and the "bolt" has around 4,5 mm.
As you can see from the pictures below, this metal parts create some undercuts and i'm not sure how can i overcome them.

The "bended" effect of the seat surroundings makes is harder to solve it.


Any help will be appreciated 

Here's some photos so you see what i'm talking about.

You'll probably find those inserts will be moulded into the seat with large spreader plates below the CF

Looks like a lotus sport seat! 

Looks like a lotus sport seat! 

I don't think that there's metal plates between the laminate. There are however plates inside the seat


20131205_114815 por Nuno Santos - Add Less, no Flickr

On my first mould i went that way, a multi part mould. One main mould for the back and bottom, and two side parts for the sides (where the metal parts are), but i had to cut the main mould because it wouldn't release the "plug"

Maybe the partition zone wasn't the best one.


Sem título por Nuno Santos - Add Less, no Flickr


Sem título por Nuno Santos - Add Less, no Flickr


bebe4bef-ccda-45d9-b1b5-a7c98cc02def por Nuno Santos - Add Less, no Flickr

I have a copy of one of those seats without the metal plates (its in grp).  The moulding had deformed slightly so I'm midway through remedial work (and modding for VX220 subframes).  Any good to you?

expoxy glue although strong often softens quite a bit when heat is applied to it, so with careful use of a heat gun you might be able to remove those plates quite easily.

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In fact this is a Lotus Race seat.

It would be very interesting if you could share some photos of your seat's mould/plug.

Thanks for the tip. I will test it with some heat gun and see if i can manage to remove the plates.

This is what I have:



The filler bits are where I've corrected the deformation of the sides.

Looking back at yours; on the back corner there's a radiused point out.  In the non-carbon seats this is a metal load spreader inside the laminate.  The seat needs the threads for the mounting bolts to be in this bit to pass scruitineering.