first crack at fiberglass

[slngsht]

well, finally decided it's time to do something with the nose and hood. I had never played with fiberglass, and had mentally been putting it off. Turned out to be pretty easy and fun.

 

The challenge with this part was that it didn't really fit the curvature of the nose, so it took some sanding. Also as you can see, this Rotus was red before it was green.

 

The next challenge is extend the hood scoop to meet up with the section on the nose.

[lambobuilder]

Good job. For those areas that you will need minor fill I would suggest using Duraglass instead of Bondo. It works great on fiberglass.

[slngsht]

Dale, thanks. I will get that.

 

Continuing on with my project, the next step is to close the big gap between the hood scoop and the nose piece that I just glassed in.

 

I'm quite sure this is not the proper way to do this, but I figured I'd give it a shot anyway. First thing I needed was an easy way to approximate the shape of what I needed to make. After some examining, it seemed like the last inch or so of the hood scoop section was starting to slope down too early, but the slope before that section was just right. So I used some pieces of wood and duct tape to rough shape the form, then glassed on top of that with a couple of vertical pieces of wood so that it holds its shape.

 

I don't have any release agent or gel coat (yikes), but the shape is not complex, so I decided to give a wax sheet a try, and it worked really well. I laid the fiberglass on the wax sheet, and laid the wax sheet in the form - this also smoothed out the relatively bumpy mold, which was intended to just get the general shape.

 

The last couple of pics show the fit around the existing parts. So far so good. I will lay the last bend down to the hood after the parts are joined.

 

One thing I have learned to take more time in working out the bubbles... there are a few on the surface. The wax paper approach worked really well. The surface is actually very smooth.

[slngsht]

and the last pic

[MHKflyer52]

Hi Mazda,

 

That looks good from what I can see in the photos should turmn out very nice.

For a release agent I have use saran wrap and it seems to work very well also.

Keep posting those photos and have fun as you can always sand or cut out anything you do not like and do it again with fiber glass.

[slngsht]

Well, no working on it this week. Weather has been cold or rainy. Today is nice, but I'm working. Still have some 'glassing to do, but so far, so good. Here is the last pic from Sunday.

[GBOLT]

I like it. Has a nice aggressive look.

 

GB

[escondidoron]

slngsht wrote:

I don't have any release agent or gel coat

 

Next time you might want to get a couple of rolls of flash breaker tape. It comes in various widths. I keep 1/2", 1" and 2" around the shop. The tape is 1.75 - 2 mils thick (.00175" - .002") and quite strong. Its very handy stuff and designed for use in moulding wet lay-up composite reinforced parts. It is readily available at composite supply shops or at Aircraft Spruce.