That tri-weave carbon is stunning. Is there much of a strength penalty for that weave pattern?
Your discussion about resin vs epoxy has me tempted to look into doing composites again. A friend used to make fiberglass 32 Ford bodies and the resin was unkind to my asthma.
I saw this happen to a guy painting a custom big block jet boat. Halfway through the second coat of primer the whole boat pulled up like this.
Fortunately the dude was an old hat, and had the foresight to warn the customer that this could happen if the customer was wrong about what the boat was painted with. Sandpaper barely touched the stuff too, I remember he had a crazy number of hours stripping that thing.
In reply to Crackers (Forum Supporter) :
That (alligatoring gel coat) was truly the worst. I left aircraft paint stripper on it for a couple days and scraped it off and just re-primered the thing with epoxy primer to ensure it didn't happen again.
Real quick before the epoxy mold pictures... after I made the splitter I had extra triaxial fabric so we decided that it would tie the car together better if there was some triaxial in the back too. So I made some end plates for the wing. Essentially used the old ones as a template but extended the bottom a bit which should theoretically increase the efficiency of the wing.
I really wanted the end plate to be glossy on both the inside and the outside - I think most people believe that it doesn't really make a difference from an air movement stand point but I think it looks nicer to have glossy carbon everywhere so I infused 4 pieces - mirror images of each other - so I could glue them together to make the end plates.
I forgot to take pictures of the gluing stage of these end plates but I used Nomex honeycomb as a core material. Makes for some really light but stiff parts. And really easy to use on flat pieces. It looks like this:
When you glue the 2 pieces together there is a seam/ gap at the edge so I filled it in with some panel bond and scrape it even. Panel bond is pretty great because it doesn't sink, or sag, so if you scrape it even then it stays that way at the edge. Here it is getting ready for the edge to be filled:
Then a couple of holes and they just had to be installed on the car.
Ok... next post will have epoxy molds :-)
Crackers (Forum Supporter) said:
That tri-weave carbon is stunning. Is there much of a strength penalty for that weave pattern?
Sorry, I missed that question before. And, Im going to be honest I don't know for sure about the strength of this weave specifically. When I used it I thought of it as being strictly a cosmetic layer and used all of the backing plys/ layers to add the strength I needed for the part.
