Expanding silicone plug


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quinn
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A while back I posted about a helicopter tail boom, about 800mm long, tapered from 40mm to 30mm. Put that project on hold for a while while i did the canopy, coming back to it now. Decided i wamy yo go with 2 peice female aluminum mold and prepreg. Vacuum bagging would work but one of you guys mentioned a positive silicone plug for squeezing the prepreg to the wall. Really like the idea of it and I might be doing a run of 100 or so. The silicone plug sounds like it would really cut down on lay up time rather than bagging each one. I've done some searching and can't find much detailed info on this method. Here's some questions I have:
1- what type of silicone do I purchase for this?
2- how do you cure the silicone? I'm picturing the stuff in tubes that obviously doesn't cure inside the tube,  so I assume it wouldn't be any different sealed inside a mold. Is heat used? Is this some kind of different silicone than what I'm picturing? 
3-  what size offset does the plug need? Prepreg layup will be about 1mm. Is it absolutely necessary to make a separate smaller mold for the plug, or is there another way around that? Was thinking maybe if silicone could be cured with heat inside the actual mold for prepreg, it would possibly shrink down enough when cooling to allow layup thickness. Any other way other than separate mold? Maybe just layup one prepreg part with vacuum bag and then pour silicone inside that? 
4- does the silicone plug need to be 100% contained to be effective? If the ends of mold are left open, is the silicone just gonna expand out the ends and not put enough pressure on walls? If that's the case, I can make bolt on caps for ends of mold to contain it. 
That's all that comes to mind for now. Any advice is very much appreciated. Thanks

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Fasta - 10/19/2018 5:20:10 AM
quinn - 10/19/2018 4:53:37 AM
Fasta - 10/19/2018 1:05:10 AM
I have done this a few times.
I would use a self adhesive sheet wax to simulate your part thickness in the mould, then simply pour cast the silicone into your mould. Make sure you vac degas the silicone to remove the air bubbles.
Don't spill any silicone on your mould as it may stick depending on your release system.


Perfect, that should do the trick. Any specific type of silicone to use? Just any casting silicone or something specific?

This is the one I used, ShoreA28 hardness and quite tough, as they may need some decent tear strength to withdraw when removing from the new carbon parts. I found it also helped to spray the silicone plug with an aerosol release agent like Mann Ease release 200. 

http://www.barnes.com.au/addit...
https://www.smooth-on.com/prod...


Ok thanks. So is it required to make the plug exactly the size of the inside of the layup? Or could the plug be made using wax sheets slightly thicker than layup so plug is just a bit smaller, making it a bit easier to get it in and out? Is there just not enough expansion for it to work that way? Just want to make this as smooth of an operation as possible if I end up doing a large run. I suppose cooling could also be used for shrinking to aid in this. Plug could be put in fridge before inserting, then after baking, demold, put carbon part with silicone in fridge, then slide plug out. The reason I'm concerned about a tight fit is because the taper is very slight, down to zero taper for last 50mm. The way I picture this working is inserting the plug after mold is closed since it needs to be joined together offset a bit, then lined up so overlaps go where they need to. Also in the overlapping joints, the layup gets thicker, so I'll have to get creative with the wax sheets to account for that so plug still fits if it really needs to be that close of a fit. 

GO

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                         https://www.smooth-on.com/product-line/ease-release/
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