To cut a long story short, I finished making all the moulds. It’s really not a pleasant job and I can see why the general consensus is that you get someone else to do it for you. You just spend forever putting more and more resin and matting in place, with the corollary in my case that the whole house stinks of resin.
Category: Construction
Not breaking the mould
You left us with me girding my loins to start mould making. I’m deep in the middle of this now, so really this is just a bunch of photo showing you where I’m up to.
The process we’re following is straight off the easy-composites lists:
- Assuming that the buck is done, ours has been declared to be finished by the authorities
- Clean the buck with mould cleaner, which smells suspiciously like a combination of brake cleaner and panel wipe.
- Apply four coats of Easy-lease chemical release agent
- Apply two coats of wax for good measure.
- Stick in a load of mould fences and discover that you can’t get them to stick to the mould-released surface. Sky hooks have to be used instead.
- Seal up all the gaps with prodigious quantities of filleting wax. (See the picture on the right, the yellow stuff is the wax.)
- Slop gel into mould and wait an age for it to go off. This is a vinyl ester product, as we want it to be impervious to epoxy which means:
- Apply a single layer of coupling coat resin and 150gsm CSM.
- Remove glass inserts from skin
- Apply four layers of mould resin and 450gsm CSM.
- Watch the colour of the mould change to white. Odd that.
Compounding interest
So, with the buck sort of OK after the alarums with the gloss coat I did a bit of patching up of the worst of the excesses of rubbing down the gloss. That left me with a buck that needed polishing up, using compounding gloop, before making the moulds. I did experiment with doing it by hand but decided I’d still be here next Christmas so I went to those nice chaps at Machine Mart and bought a compounder/polisher. Continue reading “Compounding interest”
Glossing over the problems
So, with it now green and all nice and smooth as a baby’s bum, we decided that it was about time to add the gloss coat. This is the Easy Composites substitute for the more traditional painting of the buck. In any case, the best paint to use is 2-pack and neither Adrian nor I fancied the health risks that that brought with is, or the necessity of breathing air supplied by another compressor. (Breathing in dust is bad enough but breathing in what amounts to fine glue is altogether a different issue.)
The gloss coat is just another MEKP-catalysed 2-part gloop. This time it’s transparent and is, supposedly, thixotropic so that it doesn’t flow downhill with too much alacrity and self-levelling so you retain the nice finish on the buck. Continue reading “Glossing over the problems”
Going green
Yet another quick update! As promised at the end of the last update we promptly wrecked the nice finish and rubbed it all down again. It really was “we”; at one point there were three of us all working away with nary a word between us on account of us all wearing breathing masks. This particular reprobate is Adrian who seems inordinately pleased at the carnage that he’s wreaked.
Fade to grey
Back to Black
OK, I’m back again after a couple of months seemingly covered in dust and generally making a quite spectacular mess. A word of thanks is due to my spectacularly wonderful wife for putting up with the mess. Mind you, whenever I talk about slowing down a bit Anthea’s the first to complain. So, it’s still grindstone time for me.
Long time no see
So, you might well wonder where I’ve been. The answer is, beavering away but not finding the time to talk about it due to all the other non-car work that’s going on. So, this is kind of a catch up post where I’ll probably spend too little time really telling you all the stuff that you’re desperate to know about.
Electrification
Another small update of bits and pieces this time. I’m at that bit of the build where there’s a whole stack of things to do and I seem to be spending too much time deciding what to do next.
Anyway, here’s an airbox. I’ve decided to just start with the standard airbox. As I’d twizzled the one on the J15 around it wasn’t going to be possible to use that so I found another one on eBay and here it is…
Slow progress
So, after a couple of weeks, I got the chassis back and put it up on stands in the garage although, as you can see, there’s rather of lot of junk in the garage as well.
The floor of the chassis has been bonded in, as well as riveted with some rather natty flush rivets. Now, all I’ve got to do is to put it together. The only problem at the moment is that the grey semi-shiny finish seems to upset the camera I use and quite a lot of the photos look bizarre…