Pulled the mold apart yesterday. Some minor touch up sanding to the gelcoat and its ready for some carbon! Now I need to order it so I can do some infusing next week.
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Looks great AJ! Smoooooth....will reflect in the part!
Maybe you have already thought of this or have tested and it won't be a problem.....When we did glass off road car bumpers, we also broke the mold in the middle for release, like you did. However, we built a truss structure to keep the molds perfectly straight, i.e. didn't rely just on the flange to support the mold from flexing. Since you're going to bag it, I wonder if your mold might flex, even if just a little and your bumper wouldn't be dead straight?
My thought would be to bolt the mold together and if you can make it move even a little, I would clamp it down to something while it was perfectly straight and then laminate a truss structure to the mold. Of course the truss would have to also bolt together in the middle but it would triangulate the mold and it keep it from moving when you pull the vacuum.
Hope that is good advice and isn't redundant.
I've though about that already when I bolted it back together to check fitment. I don't know if I'll build a fixture to hold everything in place or just clamp it to the bench when I get ready to bag it. Yes it does flex otherwise. I have some left over steel from my frame build that I though about using to clamp it to.
So I made my first carbon fiber infuse part. It is one layer 2x2 then two layers of 12k plain weave. It's pretty strong, but flimsy so I won't be using it. The weave laid down almost perfect so I got that part figured out. I'm going to be laying up another one once I get the mold prepped and the carbon gets here. This time I'm adding a 2mm core and another layer of 12k to it to stiffen it up. As it is right now my iPhone 6 weighs more than this part.
I also chased a vacuum leak for a long time and never got it perfect, which caused some fixable problems in the outer layer. This second part I'm going to envelope the whole mold and that will take care of any leaks I had in the joint. Hopefully more updates on it in the next week or so with a perfect usable part.
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Bumper 2.0 turned out much stronger. I used a high quality 12k fabric and a 2mm core material along with adding an additional layer of 12k. So it's 1 outer layer of 3k 2x2, 2 layers of 12k 1x1, 2mm honeycomb core, 1 layer of 12k 1x1. it eliminated a lot of the flimsy feel and made it a lot stronger. It has a few blems on the ends, but this is getting painted black anyways so I'm not worried about it. Now that I have my rear bumper done I'm going to move back to the tail lamp housings. In full carbon.