Loot and XP: Fiberglassing: Part I

The time has come in my college career when I actually make stuff with the science I've learned. Except for the part where everything I'm doing that's hands-on was a result of a quick tutorial from a good guy in Mini Baja, and then my LEGO-induced imaginative tendencies. All the theoretical stuff doesn't really matter when you're putting things together based on what you have available (i.e. fiberglass). You just have to know how to read labels, and someone older and more experienced than you needs to tell you how to use tools and machines correctly. After that, everything is up to you. Here's some fiberglass. We need body panels. Go.

So we start out with, "How do you make fiberglass?" Well step one is, Google that shit. Most people make blogs of their exploits in boat making (it's light, hydrophobic, and readily available). You start with either fabric or mat; fabric is glass, literally tiny strands of glass, woven together to form a fabric, and matte is, well, a mat of fiberglass. Fabric provides strength, epoxy provides stiffness. Epoxy is made up of resin and hardener. When you put them together in exact ratios (3:1 or 4:1 usually) they make a gooey paste stuff that can be painted on with a paintbrush. It solidifies a bit within about a half hour, and fully cures within 24 hours depending on the thickness. Start with a thin layer of epoxy, lay down a sheet of fiberglass, saturate the sheet with more resin (it's easy to tell when it's saturated), lay down a sheet of fiberglass, repeat. When you've got the stiffness you know you need (2 sheets is pretty bendable, like a CD, 3 to 4 is very stiff) you let it sit in a warm, dry environment and let it cure. But of course, to get the shape you want, you have to make a mold first, which is what I've been doing. And even before that, I had to decide how to attach the finished body panels to the car, so I had to drill a few holes and rivet a piece of sheet metal and just bend the hell out of it to see if it would break.

So molds. If you have a mold, you obviously want your piece to come off of it with some sort of ease, which is where mold releases come in. They usually come in the form of some sort of lubricant (an oil or a wax or something) or some homebrew version, like saran wrap or wax paper. What you want is something that won't kill your mold and keeps the piece in one, well, piece. So we're using wax paper because we have 4 rolls of it in the shop, and because the paraffin spray we have eats foam, which is what I made my mold out of.

To start making the mold, I measured the frame and cut out triangles in the shapes I needed.