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.
Now properly equipped I set about the buck with compounding paste and some compounding foam. It does work pretty quickly with the tool and I managed to get a decent shine on lots of the bodywork, albeit damaged by all the fun and games with the gloss coat. You can see some sort of effect with the various reflecti0ns in the photo above. You can also get some idea of the messing about from the multi-coloured nature of the buck.
All the same, with that done, it was time to start thinking about moulds. We’ve pretty much decided to make the bodywork in four pieces (front, back and two sides). However, there will be rather more actual moulds; firstly so as to be able to get the mouldings out of the moulds and, secondly, to make them a bit easier to store. (I have no idea where they’re going to go, if I’m honest…)
Critical to this business is putting some mould fences in place, which will form the flanges that will allow us to bolt the various mould pieces together. Traditionally these are formed from Correx (the sort of stuff that your estate agent uses to make for sale signs) as it’s light, mostly impervious to resin and can be made to fit to the buck.
So I set about doing this by sticking various bits into place using hot glue (I thought I’d finished with this!). Of course, you don’t get a perfect connection between the Correx and the buck so you need to fill the gap with something. Here I’ve been using wax which we’ve bought a goodly quantity of. It’s kind of tedious, though, working it into all the gaps.
Once this is done it’ll be time to clean up the buck and put a lot of layers of mould release agent onto it. The thought of the mould not coming away from the buck is the stuff of nightmares. I can then put the temporary fences, the ones between the individual panels, into place and, probably, make a test mould. Wish me luck…
Looks great. How are you going to make the body, will you vacuum bag it?
The plan is to use resin infusion… How that works out is anyone’s guess…
Well we plan to do resin infusion in a vac bagged stack, both Tim and I now own a huge roll of 50m of 300g carbon which will be the basic raw material for the body.
I’ll be doing some test pieces over the next couple of weeks to decide on the carbon layup stack.
All a good learning curve. Before we commit £mumble worth of CF we’ll try and learn the lessons Of course the faults with gloss coat mean the prospects of a naked, perfect, carbon fibre body have receded, as Tim and I are basically resigned to having to prime and paint our respective bodywork to cover the issues. Which is a shame.