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Thanks guys  A few photos for you. I started off just skinning bits and pieces for my car:  And then wanted to make a few custom bits and pieces, starting with a custom din mount for my ethanol content display made using this surround:      I also made some end caps for my rear wing. These were 100% carbon fibre:  They turned out quite well apart from a few pinholes, of course. I also made a custom rear parcel shelf. This is the original:  I wanted to mold some speakers into it:    And here is my final fibreglass plug:  Which I used as a male mold for my final 100% carbon shelf:  And all mounted up   Then recently I was contacted by a geologist/artist named Sarah Dowling, who makes art works using slices of rock and old tools. She had been making these using stainless steel trays, but she was having a lot of issues with mounting them on walls due to their weight. As you can imagine, a 70x50cm stainless steel tray would weigh 7-8kg's on it's own, let alone filled with rock and tools. So a mutual friend of hers and my dad's recommended trying carbon fibre, and so after a bit of discussion I made these trays for her. Done using wet lay, 2 layers of carbon fibre with a 10mm divinycell foam core. This was my first attempt:   That one turned out alright, but I wasn't happy with some aspects of it, so decided to get myself a resin infusion kit to see if I could improve the quality.  I had done a bit of reading, and found that divinycell wasn't ideal for infusion processes due to flow issues. So to try to help that, I drilled some holes through the core roughly every 2 inches and threaded some carbon tow through them to help bonding, and then connected the holes by scoring the core. On my first attempt, I obviously didn't make the holes close enough together as I had some dry spots:  I tried again using the same method, but this time with holes roughly every inch or so. This worked better and I didn't get any dry spots, unfortunately I had a number of pinholes that ruined the surface finish. Still not sure why exactly, but I am assuming the divinycell core prevented some air bubbles from escaping.  My third attempt was less successful again, I ended up with an interesting print through on the surface. The diamond shapes you can see are where I have scored the core, but I am unsure what caused the 'crystallization' effect.  A friend of mine that works in the industry thinks it may be a strange effect caused by the shrink rate of the epoxy resin I am using. Unfortunately resin infusion does not seem to be as common here as it is in the UK, nobody sells any infusion specific resin and getting it shipped is hugely expensive. So I am stuck with using an epoxy with a 140 mPas, which is ok but not ideal. Anyway, bit of a lengthy post so I'll stop there haha. At the moment I am playing around with gelcoat and making molds, but unfortunately nobody here sells pattern-filler that can be polished to a high gloss, so my molds are not coming out very high quality. The shape and small size of the molds I am making means they are very difficult to polish up, so I'm a bit unmotivated at the moment. Hopefully reading through these forums will inspire me again!
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Group: Forum Members
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Hi Martin, Nice to have you here! Looking forward to see some of your projects 
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Hi Martin Welcome to the forum
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Group: Forum Members
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Hey all, My name is Martin, I live in Perth, Western Australia. Just discovered these forums and have spent the last two days reading through. Have got about 70 tabs open on my screen at the moment 
Just thought I would introduce myself here; I've been playing around with carbon fibre and fibreglass for a few years but just recently got myself a resin infusion setup so I am quite heavily into it at the moment. I currently produce custom parts for my R34 Skyline, and would like to get to a level where I can supply with others with top quality parts. I'm sure I'll find the help I need on these forums! |