Canopy part 2

When last we left our hero he was ready to rock and roll on lay up after lay up of glass to knock out the biggest fairing he had ever made...

After the big taping, work pulled me away for two weeks.  The first thing I did was coat the entire surface with auto paste wax to act as an inexpensive mold release.  

I then proceeded to mix up a batch of resin to apply to my fuse.  When I started to apply the glass to my mold I noticed that the tape was shriveling up.  I proceeded to apply the glass anyway thinking that I could fill in the gaps with micro balloons during the finish phase.  The more I applied the glass the worse the shriveling became.  Soooooo..... off it all came.

This time I used more duct tape to fill in low areas and made the top layer the more expensive blue masking tape and again I used car wax to cover the mold.....  bad idea.  Again wrinkles everywhere.  

So off it all came again... ( did I mention that I was very persistent )....  and again I used the blue tape as the top layer. 

Only this time I used the real thing ( MOLD Release ) from Aircraft Spruce.  That did the trick.  I notice that some folks have had good luck using car wax on molds made out of duct tape.  While this may work out just fine the issue is that duct tape is pretty thick and typically it's a good idea to make the last layer of your mold out of very thin material like masking tape to avoid having to fill in the waves that duct tape will create.  Less micro balloons, less weight, less gas burned to get you to your destination.  Sorry, I don't make the laws of physics, I just have to live by them ;-)

So here is the final taped up mold covered with mold release and ready for glass.

Here is the finished layups ( I plan on adding details of how I did this to my fiberglass tutorial link soon ).  This represents a starting layer of 8 oz bidi glass followed by a layer of 5 oz bidi carbon, then glass, carbon, and then finally the last layer is regular 8 oz glass.  Carbon is hard to sand and finish as it frays so always make your last layer regular glass.

Here we are popped fresh out of the mold and ready for trimming.  As you can see it's pretty rough.  I decided to go ahead and back drill the top attach points while I still had it on the canopy ( see the row of holes across the top ).  With this registration I can put it back on the canopy and drill all the other holes knowing that it will all line up.  Please take note of the fact that the intersection point ( where the horizontal and vertical layers overlap ) is 10 layers thick.  I could stand on this joint and it wouldn't even flex.

Here is the first shot at trimming.  More will be trimmed off... after I drill all the holes.  I can then round off the corners, do the finish work, and shoot a coat of primer.  There was no actual extra work (metal vs glass) from what I can tell from others experiences as this is a sure thing ( no second guessing about fit ) it's just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other.  I do my best work when I can use intuition instead of skill :o)

More to come...