Project Log: Monday, May 30, 2011
After lightly sanding the new fiberglass, I removed the
new parts from their molds. The flanges released
easily, but in both cases this also caused the body of
the mold--which I'd only hot-glued and lightly filleted
to the plywood bases--to come off along with the
finished part. This was no particular problem, as
it took only a bit of prying to release the remaining
portions of the mold.
On the first piece, I broke apart one side of the mold
during this removal process, but kept it together on the
second piece. The finished parts looked excellent. |
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At some point during the construction of these things, I
realized I'd made an error, albeit minor. I'd
designed each recess to contain two fill pipe
assemblies, and made the two pieces identical.
However, I'd intended to enlarge one of the recesses to
contain three fill pipes, the extra one to service the
under-cockpit fuel tank.
Rather than start over, I decided to "jumbo-ize"
one of the molded parts by cutting the piece in half and
inserting a center section to widen it the necessary
amount. To this end, I reassembled one of the
molds--the second one, where the center section had come
out in one intact piece--and quickly re-filleted two of
the sides with some green acrylic putty I had on hand
from something else. I rewaxed the mold
before continuing.
Then, I laminated about an 8" wide section of "middle"
over the top of the mold, repeating the basic laminate
schedule I'd employed on the original parts, though this
time I applied all the layers at the same time, since
the piece was so easy to mold. |
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I marked off a 1-1/2" wide flange around the recesses on
the finished pieces and trimmed away the excess with a
saw. |
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Total Time Today: 1.25 hours
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