Making a prepreg mould

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Making a prepreg mould

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Wonderbike	W Wonderbike posted 6 Years Ago HOT Topic Details
W Group: Forum Members Posts: 6, Visits: 38	Hi, I am in the process of making a mould that I want to use with prepregs to make a brake lever, so far I have taken a mould of the lever using the easy composites epoxy mould starter kit (green gel coat). I want to make a pattern from this mould and then a final mould from that, that can be used with prepregs in an oven. My question is what should I use to make the pattern? My understanding is that it will need to cure at a low temperature but then be post cured to a much higher temperature in order to make a final mould from it using tooling prepreg? Sorry if my terms are incorrect, this is all new to me. Thanks, Luke.
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Wonderbike	W Wonderbike posted 6 Years Ago HOT Post Details
W Group: Forum Members Posts: 6, Visits: 38	+x Hanaldo - 6/7/2019 6:07:11 AM The UD simply doesn't breathe as efficiently as the woven materials, so it''s harder to get the air out when it is on the mould surface. There's really nothing you can do about it when using out of autoclave. Toughness depends on the clear coat, there's a million different clear coats so it's a bit of a how long is a piece of string type question. Some clear coats are significantly tougher than a raw resin finish, some will scratch with your finger nail. You'll have to speak to your suppliers about that one, but here's a hint: toughness tends to correlate closely to price. Ok I understand now. Is it possible to use component prepreg to make the final mould? What would be the disadvantages of doing so? Just thinking about cost saving at this stage, I will probably only pull a couple of parts from it..
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