WELCOME TO RIVER DAVES PLACE

Don't be afraid to fail

Racey

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This resulted in a complete failure half way through, but eventual success and a lot of learning along the way.

Helmet air ducts.

First wax the helmet and pop a laminate in the area we are going to use, this gives us a thin structure of our helmet shape.

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Epoxy our rough duct shape into place, this is just a piece of grey plastic conduit that i heated and roughly bent into a slight curve then cut and bedded in epoxy thickened with silica.

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Grind and cover with epoxy thickened with fairing compound (easier sanding more like bondo but epoxy based, the silica is very strong and hard to sand)

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Sand into shap by hand, you can see where the silica portion peeks through in some areas, it is much much more difficult to sand.

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Cover in gel coat.

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Sand and fair the gelcoat.

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Waxed and then attempt to pull a mold off this plug and completely fail

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Racey

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Repair the plug by sanding, re-gelling, sanding, re-gelling, then polishing to a much higher surface finish and applying about 10 coats of mold release wax over the course of a few days while waiting for non waxed gel coat to arrive. I also greatly re-enforced the plug at this point by adding a bunch of laminate and thickened epoxy to the back side to make it much much stiffer and stronger.

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Chopping up a bunch of scrap carbon fiber to make the equivalent of a chopped strand matt as a tie layer between the gel coat and sheet layers.

These fibers i whipped up into a goopy paste in some polyester resin with silica, it makes a nasty mush but ties to the gel much better as it has a much lower chance of air pocket than going straight to a sheet lamination.

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Cover the heavily waxed plug in non waxed gel coat. Non waxed gel will remain tacky on the surface even after curing, this bonds to the subsequent layers much better. What i learned here is that the atmosphere prevents the resin from curing, so when in the mold, the finish surface void of air will cure hard, but the exterior surface will remain tacky with a non wax gel, wax additive is used in finish coats and it secretes itself to the surface to seal the gel/resin while it cures. It can be added separately or purchased integrated into the gel.

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All laminated with misc scraps of carbon fiber.

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Success, just a couple little specs popped free of the plug but nothing a little razor blade and sand paper couldn't fix.

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Backlash

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I love these types of projects you've been working on! 👍👍
 

Racey

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I love these types of projects you've been working on! 👍👍

Definitely different from what i normally am doing, figured it would be interesting to others to watch my baby steps. Like my other threads on the subject, my only composite experience was glassing a small bulkhead here or there. never any finish work like this, i learned a lot just by watching guys like mike patey for carbon and some sailboat guys on youtube when it came to gel coat.

What is cool is that it takes literally no specialty tools other than a multitool and a sander/grinder to do all this stuff. So very easy for a hobby person to dip their toes 👍
 
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