Hi there,

I've made a mould to produce Carbon fibre loops, the dimensions of the grooves are 5x5mm, which is the intended cross section dimensions of loops.
Initially I had an idea of taking carbon fibre loops out of mould and vacuum bagging them then i realised the might change the square cross section of loops which i want to keep.

So I wonder if vacuum bagging to whole mould with fibres in grooves will be efficient in this case or grooves too small?

And do you recommend any special arrangement of vacuum bagging materials?

Regards

Mohamed

Hi Mohamed
What are loops? We need a clearer description of what your are trying to do. Pictures would help.
Fred

Hi Fred,

What I'm making is carbon fibre loops. I make them by winding 12K carbon tows around mould many times.
So far I got  low fibre volume, (about 45% fibre, 55% resin) as I didn't use vacuum bagging.

Now I'm thinking of use vacuum bagging but as you can see in the photo the grooves are quite narrow (5mm width, 5mm depth) so I wander if vacuum bagging will make difference! as not sure if  peel-ply+breather+vacuum bag layers can stretch to apply pressure on each groove.

Thanks
Mohamed

Only way is to try it.  Its not going to be easy.  You will have to work on one groove at a time.  Life would be much easier if you have a blunt tool sized to fit in the groove to help push in fabric and bagging stack.

in fact a different approach might be a positive tooling that you clamp around the current mould with ridges on it to match the grooves, you can then manually clamp it tight thus squeezing out some the excess resin.  Youd just want thin strips of breather cloth between each groove then.

Warren Penalver
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Support Assistant