All the Fiberglass for the 55 Build! Doors, Bumpers, Front Clip, Trunk Lid - 55 Build - Video 7

hey guys welcome back to a 55 build so chassis work is still going on but we're currently waiting on a couple pieces to move forward with the front so we are going to switch gears here and go for some fiberglass work so lots of fiberglass to be done there's a couple pieces that we'll lay a mold up on and then a couple that we're gonna kind of cheat around the mold and then we actually have a mold for the front clip so coming up lots of fiberglass been flipped around show you what we're gonna do so right now dad is over there at the blasting cabinet getting it ready so it's just needed to be worked on so he's just taking the time to do it change out glass beads and all that and get it get it ready to go so i'm going to blast these three bumper sections here so then we're gonna put them together and pull a mold so we went to order a bumper and the lead time was like 10 weeks and if you do the math we don't have 10 weeks so i was like well we'll just make one ourselves so that's what we're gonna do force us to go ahead and do it and then here are the molds for well they're not even really a mold but moldish for numb there's quick mold for nomad doors so a nomad door comes up here cuts off nomad is actually a little bit shorter i think it's like i can't remember three or four inches shorter than a 55 and a 55 door has the frame around it so the rest of it is the same basic shape don't know my parents actually have like 15 20 years of fiberglass that's what they used to do um they built fiberglass 41 or 41 and 33 willys and they built fords so fiberglasses no new task around here what are you doing this needs to be done a little while i think smart look at you wearing your mask see or lack of sea yeah that's the problem so getting it we're ready to go [Music] still got a bumper sticker fun [Music] [Music] i'm taking an old bumper that's beat up trusted you got them nice and clean in the glass bead cabinet they were solid rust yeah they looked rough i'm straightening them i'm beating them like they used to do chrome bumpers i was thinking about it he used to work at i worked at a dealership and they come get all the wrecked car bumpers you know every week and they take them to the bumper shop and they when they come back and see all these chisel marks inside because they'd be bent like the guys back then would straighten that out just an anvil and hammers and then they grind the outside you know it's like doing bodywork except don't bondo and they coat it with copper you know grind them flat coat them in copper you see copper in there and then that copper was like the primer they polish and sand that copper and then chrome plate them and most the time they looked really good but there was bumper shops everywhere back then i'm going to coat it with fiberglass and as far as doors go well we are pulling a mold part of a mold but part of the mold right but not i built these doors typically a mold i build it like half to 5 8 inch thick but that was to make hundreds and hundreds of parts out of this i built these when it's orange is typically a mold i built these molds off of a pair of fiberglass doors that i built 20 years ago for a 55 nomad so i rebuilt the mole i got rid of those molds so i pulled another mold off of those doors and that's this i only built one set out of it and it was not reinforced you know i'd make my moles really thick and then reinforce them with steel or wood right so this is just a very thin temporary limited use mold but a sedan door and a nomad or a hard top door is basically the same except for as explaining the nomads a couple inches shorter and then it's also not got the frame well the roof on a hard top or a nomad is the windshield's like two inches shorter so it looks like a factory chop top so a sedan or postcard has a really tall roof so but that has nothing to do with this this this part of the door the skin and the inner structure is basically the same except you got a post around it so what i'm doing or we're going to do is grind this back we're gonna prepare this for a mold and we're just gonna finish this as a sedan door so it'll just be molding into the mold and then pull yeah we're just gonna add to this mold and then we'll put some reinforcement this time because i'll probably use them more than once but that's what that's what's going on here these are the doors off of the car to come show the bottom so you get all the haters that say you ruined a perfectly good car yeah that's how good that car was so they're really good for nothing they're they're not just rusted look how smash this is i don't know why but somebody just beat this car to pulp so i'm gonna the inner doors will be the same let me bring it over there this is so this is what the inside you know it's orange and fairly smooth and when i build a real mold i've polished that and waxed it it's shiny so there's the inner door and this stuff you see on here is mold release so i'll spray mold release on this we'll just make a pair of doors for our car but we'll have the molds that we can use in the event we need one it's that's the mold layer upper but dead here actually was the fiberglass layer for so many years i mean they had employees at the time but there's an example she laid up you did the whole body on this card yeah so mom laid up all the fiberglass so this is a body i know people have actually asked about the blue car sitting over here so this is the last 41 willis out of your guys molds correct yeah so this is they i don't know how many hundreds of them they did but about a thousand she said about more probably more than a thousand lots and lots and lots of fiberglass cars so anyways she laid this up so she is a fiberglass guru not just park guru as well so over here this is the front bumper so it was grimy so she's been polishing it up with some mothers and then now she's acetoning to remove the oil the oil off so the pva which is the mold release will stick to it and then we'll put gel coat on it and start layering them so going to go through like here so grab your stuff over there and come over and work the holes cover up the holes and then and then use putty to make this smooth so there's not a sharp edge yeah so putty in so it like has a and smooth entry exit here so putty tape and then that'll be pretty but that's a nice that's a nice bumper so that's what's going on [Music] [Music] so [Music] and i mean mika's not doing any fiberglass but she looks pretty so that counts for something she is uh sitting outside what's up meek mika she hears dad talking she's not listening to me got that finished so just went through cleaned up around so basically that's just feeling filling it and sealing it and then any imperfections stand out in the middle so ours we did with clay he's doing his with bondo why bondo vs clay on the other one because i don't have well it's not actually fond of this fiberglass bondo but i don't have any real bondo i didn't realize i was out but look at this this is a chunks bumper so why fill that with clay i was the other bumper we're trying to save this one i don't care so we're gonna just smooth over that crack real nice [Music] going to the lower shop to get the love going to shops going to the lower shop to get the trunk lid so while dad is finishing bondoing the rear bumper to get it smooth he was gonna just do it where it was really rough so just do a one-off for our stuff but it's like i'm already doing it so might as well make it nice where if anybody wants one you can lay it up and actually have a real mold so that's usually how stuff goes around here it starts off simple and it's not um so i'm going to put the front one it's already in the booth going to set that up so i can pva it first coming down here to get the trunk lid so mom and i can lay or the trunk lid mold so we can lay it up so it's good because we at least already have a couple of the molds like we got the front clip mold and we've got the trunk lid mold over there so already got some stuff in the door so really the only thing we're having to pull molds on is the bumpers and those are small pieces so that's good so as you can see there's a couple molds down here this whole shop so from here forward used to be um like just full of molds so all the bodies and everything for the fiberglass willys and stuff like that that was full of molds and then down here on this end is where they would lay up fiberglass now the shop is pretty much just storage but so here is an example of a complex mold his dad was talking about like for his bodies and stuff like it used to like it's in rotisseries so this is the front clip for the 55 so um as he was talking about reinforced rotisserie a complicated piece pulled together mold you can see it's a really thick mold for multiple uses so we'll be laying another front clip up out of this there's one sitting over here and then there's a couple more stacked on the other end so much different than the mold that you just saw for the front clip this is the mold for the trunk lid so this is an example of like a simple quick mold for like a one time yeah we popped this off of our gasser just because the stock trunks so it's heavy and one day i decided to shave 30 pounds so [Music] not for sale so we didn't care about you know gel coat or anything but it'll work great for the second car yeah so this is a simple mold versus like the more complex one you saw we typically reinforce them so they don't continue to work you know the thing about this is so it works a little it doesn't matter because the trunk is going to be flexible anyways right progress on this bumper this is looking good getting it all smoothed out so that's actually going to be a really nice piece now it's getting close to pva's got a little bit of mud he said down here so i'm gonna go back to pva pieces in the paint booth but this will be ready for that pretty [Music] soon [Music] now so got presents stirred trunk lids ready so this has primer so that's ready to be actually laid because this is the mold and then this is got gel coat and it's ready for a mole to be made [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so i got the first layer on trunk lid and bumpers this has started to set so going through and trimming it's a little bit green yet i'm gonna give it a few more minutes [Applause] i just don't want to be so hard that it makes it where i tear it loose from the bumper when i trim this right here is multi-layer because that's where the overlap is fiberglass updates these are the molds for the bumpers that we're laying up the steel is still in them the steel bumper so i haven't taken those out yet letting them dry and form so that way they don't bend and flex so much so this is the door finished uh the door mold i should say it's not the door the door mold the outer skin finished so this is the part from here up that was added on glass that back in and then added steel reinforcement so that way the mold doesn't bend and then getting ready to do that same thing on this door here and then there's the inner molds but modifying this mold as well i think it's time to pop out a trunk lid though okay time to pop this out i'm trying to do it without a hammer nice so that is the mold release that we spray the stuff that he's peeling off that'll wash off with water so a little thinner than the one on the blue 55 that's probably six pounds that looks pretty good i like that so chocolate that uh ground the edges cleaned those up a little and then grounded so the parachute slash trailer mount clears so that looks good in the time that it took us to build that it would have taken that long to order it and get it off the ups that's true that's literally a fast pace this not so much on the inner door skin it's not going to be extended it's going to be a piece that you join together we made a the top post part i got to grind that we just laid that up like 10 minutes last night so i didn't trim it because it's really a complicated part and i didn't want to disturb it so i'll cut this with a saw today take it off and we'll just build that part and we'll have the door skin one piece but we'll put the upper part and the lower part that we make and the mold and i'll just clasp them together so we're only making one set multi-purpose doors as he said yeah the molds will work for a nomad or a closed car still nice let's see what deb is up to so these were sitting in the paint booth they've been sitting in the paint booth for a little while haven't they oh yeah yeah so they were sitting in the paint but they got a little bit of overspray so she's just hitting it with 400 so that way she can uh we can get that smoothed up get that off and then uh we didn't know we're going to be building a 55 and even the doors as fast so here we go then are we going to wax these are we just going to go just pva so sometimes they wax them so that way this one's such a quick one which is cool since it's for us and it's not a customer stuff and it's quick just pva it rather than work so you can see here that's what it looked like there was just um overspray i tried acetone on it and lacquered thinner and nothing was touching it so a little bit of 400 action and it looks like it's cleaning up are you putting fire to fiberglass you can't do that canyon well it looks like it's working that's not burning it doesn't look like it's burning to me so these molds were really thin and really quick once we got these doors made the mold set around just standing up and i never had time to reinforce it with steel to keep it from warping so it worked it was trying to turn into a cup so i've got a clamp to the sedan door and i'm just using the heat to relax it and then we'll glass peel all the way around it like the other one when we get it extended up here so yeah i've used i've used the torch to bend fiberglass a lot way back when we used to get fiberglass it was really crooked from some other companies and we'd have to twist it and shape it and this is the way i do it getting ready to bust the bumper out of the mold and just ground it sanded it and hit it a few times i think it's about ready i need my plastic wig nice nice okay that looks like it's ready for a park to be laid out next step you'll have a glass bumper we'll just reverse that process and light it up that looks good mom is running downstairs to grab some more rollers because as you can see on these parts so with all these uh bumps and stuff you're gonna want small rollers to roll through here to get all the air out yesterday um got three coats of pva which is the mold release on these inner door skins and then this one outer skin and uh dad got him primered mom and i had to go to a hair appointment he kind of primed and got some work done in the back we'll go see what he's doing but today we'll get all of these laid up what do you get going on here we're gonna pva them so they don't have to be waxed or anything they're nice they came out really good now just they could be laid up as they are but to make them last for a long time we're going to put some steel on them this just keeps them from warping because they will eventually warp so we'll come back and lay glass on here i'll put a couple bars out this way so they'll stand up and right side up this is kind of important how they stand you can't lay something that's rolling around so we'll fix them where they like that so that's done then the top of the second door is done and i'm getting ready to make steel to reinforce this this mold this is the top of one of the doors the first one so we'll lay this piece up just by itself and then when we put the door skin back in the mold to glue it all together the part that comes out of here will glue on the top and i'll just seam it to the bottom of the door since we're only doing a couple doors it'll just be a multi-piece it's much easier and faster for us [Music] [Music] lots of fiberglass progress today so saturday they've been laying up doors um i'll show you the progress we're about to wrap it up for the day we're going to go extend the other door mold right now which won't take that long and then call it for the day and then come back in tomorrow and lay up bumpers and lay up the other doors again let's turn it into a mess in here so this is the passenger side door so we did one layer of fiberglass below and then we rolled two layers of carbon so we didn't do the vacuum bag infusion stuff just rolled carbon so there's just some loose fiberglass on it from we assist to note we're not doing the carbon to save weight here we were doing it for strength we are weight conscious but that is not why we did carbon strength there and then these are the inner shells so this is actually a really hard part because you see all the like all the bumps so you're chasing air constantly throughout here so um dad actually came and helped mom and i roll out the last couple layers because you do the first layer you do by itself and then we did a total of three layers so we did the second two layers like every other part together so since there's so much we had him wetting it out while we rolled it out so that one's already done and trimmed so you'll go through and grind that and then over here we just finished laying this one up so you can see what it looks like when it's not trimmed so we did get the molds for the bumpers ready so that'll be ready to lay up tomorrow and this is almost ready to be extended to work so it's in that mold and then uh that'll be ready tomorrow as well [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so here is the front end that you already saw we're getting ready to pull it out the front end mold and i mean i'm saying it's like a two-hour job to lay that out yeah maybe the first layer a day a day a full day a full day an eight hour day or a 12 hour day hopefully an eight hour but i'm going with four hours so we're gonna pull it out and wax so we're gonna wax this one why are we waxing this one it's been we've sanded it and buffed it and it's already been waxed so it once it since it's prepped that way we re-wax it and then you can just pull apart so we don't preview that's what we ate this one speeds up the process yes okay so getting ready to pop the outer door skin out of the mold that's a lightweight door bam well it looks like a door yeah it looks like a 50 dollar means it must be a door what are you doing um [Music] the hard part this looks like a fairly complicated uh process that we're getting ready to deal with glass right here on both of them glass right here and then do a section right here and flip it up and take off so this is going to be um we'll do one layer first to get all of the air out and then we will do um two layers that's what i think we're gonna do to be determined but yes mama got our cheap flashlight handy-dandy flashlight nowhere so yeah so um this is black the others have been gray primer this is black gel coat because grape primer is really hard to see air in parts so gel coats a little bit heavier wouldn't you say it's a lot heavier it's a lot heavier yeah that's why we avoided not but it's also a sandable gel coat so we can sand it down [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] what are you working when was this like when you were four or five years old i built that way yeah so back then i built some fiberglass doors and i probably did it literally in two days because i built a car in like two weeks anyway this was the inner structure where the hinges bolt because steel doors have it in them you know so i captured the plate where the the nut plate where the hinges go and i'm taking it out of those doors and lightening it up a little and putting it in your doors so you've got the door back here mocked up what's the next steps on this i'm gonna i pulled the molds off of these doors that we made 20 years ago and so luckily by doing that you can see here that i put putty over every allen bolt head so all i got to do is drill these holes and bolt that piece back into this door and then i'll glue the door together i've got it all clamped together right now so i'll put glue clamp it together and then because it's not a nomad door anymore which you know no post on a nomad and just this little wing window post we're putting a post on it so we didn't want to take the time to build a whole new mold so i'll literally glass the upper to the lower once we get it all glued together it will be a postcard now so that's what it's going to look like and then that way i don't know i think you already said it but that way it can use stock hinges so that's the whole goal that's the beauty of that is the stock hinges will slide in and that plate's captured you literally just put three bolts in each hinge through these openings and it'll adjust and works just like a stock door i wanted to do a lighter weight hinge because 55 hinges are heavy but we just don't have the time so we're going to choose that's the place we saved all the way with the fiberglass we're gonna add it that's it you save it one place and you have to have it in another place someday we'll make some aluminum hinges what's the difference gonna make you know if we save 10 10 pounds on hinges one second it is not gonna make a hundredth of a second so it's not worth worrying about not when we have another one that i got the bumpers ground oh yeah i sanded this one is the three piece where it was you know they use a bumper guard to go there so i just hit that with the d.a but they came out pick that up and show how light it is we weighed them last night three and a quarter pounds on this one that was before i ground it so it's a little bit lighter and then a little bit lighter than what the stock one well i mean a little bit lighter even when we weighed it yesterday it's a lot lighter than a stock one and then this one down here which for the front that was a three and a half pounds three point four pounds yesterday so it's it's three and a quarter pounds and then this is what the top of the doors looks like we pulled those off of some steel doors which are out back now but we move quick mold off of steel doors just to get that upper piece and we laid it up because i'm only going to do it once or twice this is what the inner door looks like it's a little bit heavier than some doors would be you know it's made three layers of fiberglass so it's but it's a street car you know we're going to be jumping in and slamming the doors and it's okay to be a little bit the goal was to not have it where you look at it and it flexes yeah when the inner is the one that's the structural part the latch and the hinges and everything so it won't weigh much it'll be a nice store it'll be a lot lighter than stock that's the main thing also real quick before we get started let's do a parts update of some stuff that came in we have like a summit going on over here parts parts parts which is a great thing because when it comes time to starting to put stuff together we're gonna start running out of time um so we need the parts here so that's that's awesome so we have this new strange floater kit which just made it which will go in this rhodes chromoly three and a half inch tube rear end housing it's a ford nine inch um lots of other parts in here but that's two that made it this week that's exciting and then oh there's some uh we leave a wheelie bar kit from timochemist as well as the anti roll bar what how people call different things anyways right there that's that kit um and then up here see is a sheet of carbon fiber that we ordered from summit so there'll be one more carbon fiber sheet coming in and then we'll have two carbon fiber wheel tubs so going for all the lightweight things so um we will have carbon fiber floors carbon fiber panels and then steel of course on the driver's side but lots of carbon lots of weight saving there so let's see what else came in oh i don't know if i've even showed you guys these so not from summit but carried by summit billet specialties wheels as well as mickey thompson tires so got these new these are brushed magnesium they have a gold finish they're actually brushed magnesium double bead locks 16 16 with mickey thompson 35 inch tires so these well there's one in the car already this is a different look looks different but it looks good look at that so then that's the front this is uh these are comp series and then we have a set of street lights for the rears uh for the street tires so i'll go show you those as well i think it looks really good though have you heard drag weeks ago oh that's true that is true i feel like the whole internet's heard that i think everybody's heard it's just pretty cool the news heard around social media yes so drag week is ago so hopefully we can hit all four events back to back to back with us so exciting last thing before we get back to work here is the street lights with the mickey thompson street tires so again brush magnesium um it needs tire shine don't judge me okay get into a big order of mother's tire shine coming in because we got lots of rubber so these are gonna look good in the car these are a little bit shorter than the race combination but we're going to just we'll just we've already got it figured out adjust the shocks and everything that way it's not dragging in the back when we're driving so we'll get it figured out but i really really liked really really like the finish on [Music] so mad scientist mixing up glue putty i'm experimenting experiments what i do best experimenting so what is in this mixture it's just fiberglass resin and cavacil which is just a very white fluffy flower like powder and then i put hardener in it so we're getting ready to glue here that's what you'll use eventually to glue the doors to the whole thing right now i'm just gluing a piece of aluminum in here for a weather strip to attach to it's changing colors i just want to make sure that i just pour a little hardener in there there's no i can't measure something like this so i'm making sure it changes color before i put it on there it's not a very nice whoa a little job but i'll clean it up i didn't know i was gonna be filmed i didn't know you're gonna be filming this isn't hollywood i don't edit i just do it it looks cool though so i uh i'm just making a big wad right there the problem is if i get it too thick it'll build up heat and then that little thin carbon fiber door there it might warp it so i got to be concerned about that much better that's the problem with using this homemade putty is heat store-bought putty which i don't have we used to use it but we get it by the five gallon buckets and i don't need five gallons so i'm making my own what i mean looks stuck see i'm gonna get that extra out of there let's see very nice very very nice okay so we got one layer completely on it we just finished that up so we haven't trimmed this bottom edge yet but other than that this piece first layer is totally done so we'll let it dry tonight and then tomorrow when you guys will see this video we'll finish laying up the other two layers and then i guess in probably what two days or so let it sit for a couple days and then pop it out probably on the weekend yeah yeah so probably maybe see it on the weekend so you guys will see it in the next video but you've seen what it'll look like now you see the process so repeat that again um dad's in the back finishing up doors our job was better than his so i'm gonna show you what he's doing and then we'll wrap this up for now as you can see he's doing all the grinder work that's the itchy job that one's not fun see my door holder oh yeah fans can walk away from it oh nice nice is this door almost just making little adjustments to make it fit as close as we can before we put hinges on it and then i'll do the final fit so it's closed this is the only one you're going to do tonight right yeah in multiple pieces so any final things before we wrap this episode up are you good i think i'm good we'll see the doors i'm tired of tomorrow maybe it'll be the last the problem with with being able to do a lot of different things you do a lot of different things it'd be better if you just bought some stuff or reduce everything but on this we did try to buy some stuff but it's like a nine to ten week lead time so we were forced yeah i mean we've got a week in it basically yeah it's not too bad so wrapping that up and then uh we'll be done so that is it for this episode i hope you guys enjoyed it i enjoyed this one um fiberglass work does suck kind of but it's also kind of fun because you see a part come to life that you didn't have to buy that came out a flat sheet of fiberglass so it was really cool it's always fun to see that i am over it though i'm ready for it to be done tired of itching i'm tired of wearing clothes that i can ruin so anyways hope you guys enjoyed it as always be happy go fast and stay pretty i will see you guys next time you

Channel: Riding With Alex Taylor

Views: 207,468

Keywords: 55 Chevy, Race Car, Street Car, Quick Build, Race Week Car, Drag Week Car, Tube Chassis Car, 25.1 Cert, 6 Seconds, Quarter Mile, Alex Taylor Racing, ATR, Hot Rods by Dennis Taylor, DTR, 55, Quest for the 6s, Quest for the Sixes, ididit, ididitperformance, sema, summit, summit racing, build series, patina, 25.3 Cert, SFI Certification, Holley, Roll Cage, Funny Car Cage, SEMA, GettheSummitAdvantage, Fiberglass, front clip, doors, trunk lid, bumpers, BilletSpecialites, TeamMT, MickeyThompson

Id: fhyp0ljH9ag

Length: 45min 48sec (2748 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021