DIY Racecar Mold and Fiberglass Fabrication (Build Your Own Aero)

hey welcome to the freedom fries channel i'm james fryes and today we're going to talk about fiberglass fabrication okay first things first let's talk about the elephant in the room painless performance does not make sure any smaller than this that's actually a lie sorry andrew there's two primary types of fiberglass fabrication one is a wet layup and that's often what you'll see on youtube you see a lot of people that'll make mold lay fiberglass over it and then pull it off the problem with wet layup in this method is that it will create an imperfect product your fiberglass and resin will be on the outside it will require a ton of sanding to get something that's decent enough to put onto your vehicle the proper way to do fiberglass fabrication is to create a plug this would be what people would normally lay their fiberglass over you'll create a negative mold from this plug okay you'll pull that off and this is going to allow you to do a wet lay-up which is going to create a very aesthetic product in the end or allow you to do a vacuum infusion which is going to create the lightest and strongest composite possible vacuum infusion is obviously the best method the only problem with that is the product that it requires and the investment into the materials and equipment are slightly higher than what's required for a wet layup now for today what we're going to do is just a bolt-on door skin for the 350z this does not necessarily require the strongest material and weight necessarily isn't a big factor either because we're only going to do about three layers of fiberglass this is just to do an aesthetic improvement for the three of disease because we often bang them up so what we're going to first do is pull the door off the 350z so that we can create a mold from that and show you how to do a proper wet layup here's our 350z door on the car and off the car okay so we've cleaned the door this is now an acceptable plug let's talk about the things that we'll need from the first layer to the last layer as far as creating a mold from this we're going to start with some masking tape we're going to lay it around the edge of the door this will create a template for us to transfer onto sign board we'll stick the sign board on the outside around the door so that when we spray our gel coat it has some to run onto this will give you excess room for the fiberglass when you lay it down into the actual mold so after creating our template for the sign board and securing the sign board with a glue gun we're then going to use filleting wax this will allow us to fill any gaps between the sign board and the door so that the gel coat doesn't run into any crevices and make it impossible to pull the mold from the plug then what we're going to do is coat the door with a mold release agent this is a wax that we're going to lay on top of the actual door to help pull the mold from followed by pva this is also a mold release agent you don't necessarily need to do both of these i've done just a wax and been able to pull it off however i want to make sure this is a clean of a mold as possible and i have no releasing issues then we're going to make sure our gel coat is mixed we're going to put it into a dump gun and spray it on you can paint the gel coat on a lot of people do that however in my experience the gel coat goes on much more evenly with the gun and so the final product is going to be much nicer after which we'll mix our resin lay our fiberglass on top we'll do a couple layers and then finally finish it off with one more layer of resin mixed with wax so that it can cure the fiberglass resin you pick up from like autozone already has a wax built into it this prevents it from being able to be used for multiple layers however it allows it to cure after laying on the layers that you've already done okay so let's go ahead and get started with laying the masking tape so we can get the template for the sign board [Music] okay now that we've made all of our templates we're going to remove all the masking tape and we're going to hot glue it underneath the door this is going to give it a border for the gel coat to sit on to [Music] okay now that the sign board has been filled around the door what i'm going to do is take this wax and fill in any gaps so that the gel coat when it's sprayed doesn't sink into that and keep me from taking the mold off of it i'm also going to cover the door handle with it because the gel coat will not stick to this and so it'll allow me to create a negative space for the door handle because i'm not going to use that at all in this mold now that i've applied the wax around the border for the gel coat and filled in all the little gaps what i'm going to do is apply pva this is a mold release agent and then after it dries we're going to apply a wax on top of it so we're going to go ahead and mix this up and just paint it on okay it's been about 30 minutes and the pva has cured so we're going to go ahead open up our wax and apply it so we applied a pretty heavy coat i still applied it to the wax even though technically it shouldn't need it and i applied it to the sign board on the outside again it shouldn't technically need it but i really don't want any issues when i pull this mold this is just like normal automotive wax we're going to let it sit let it get hazy then we're going to buff it off with a microfiber towel and then we'll apply our gel coat okay the wax and the pva have completely dried on the door it's just a little sticky and we're going to do now is apply the gel coat i know i initially said that i'd be spraying it on um i've changed my mind we're going to go ahead and paint it on so what we're going to do is one quart of gel coat to 10 ounces of mekp we're just going to measure it i would rather weigh it to the gram but i don't feel like doing that sort of conversion so i'm going to measure measure stir and then apply our gel coat we're going to do it eight mils thick and we have a tool for that what we'll do is take this tool and press it onto the gel coat it'll show us the thickness of the gel coat once it actually reaches each little indent this needs to be at about 70 degrees there's no way that this is at that temperature so what i'm going to do is pour warm it up and then we're going to catalyze it with the mekp so for this particular brand and mixture requires 10 ccs of mekp to one quart of the resin we're going to pour this in here stir it make sure you scrape the bottom generally speaking you want to move this into another tub and then re-stir make sure that it's properly mixed but here at the freedom fry channel we just kind of half-ass everything don't we okay that's not mixed it never will to do is just be a thick coat you want to apply a little bit onto the sign board here this is going to give us a level to put the double stick tape if we ever decide to vacuum bag so you must be much more generous than i was not even at the four mils thickness yet like i said before i started laying down the gel coat the temperature is a little bit lower than i'd want typically you want it around 70 degrees it's a little bit lower than that i think it's actually around 60 right now so i've given the gel coat approximately three hours to cure i probably could have used more mekp and that would have cured a lot faster but it's now at the point that it needs to be where it has just a little bit of tack what i'm going to do now is mix up my iso resin and start with a layer of fiberglass cloth the reason why i'm using fiberglass cloth in the beginning is because it conforms the shapes more easily then i'll follow it up with two layers of fiberglass mat depending on how that looks i may lay more layers the final coat of the resin has to have wax mixed in that allows a barrier for oxygen which will allow the resin to fully cure but for now let's go ahead and mix up our resin and measure out our cloth and then get started when you're dealing with carbon and dealing with fiberglass you definitely want some dedicated shears it's just going to make your life that much easier now what i'm going to do is take my mat and i'll measure it out cut it up and get it ready before we actually mix up the resin this stuff will cure much more quickly in a higher temperature it's not something i'm necessarily worried about but because of past experiences i want to make sure everything's prepared before i just start laying everything down super toxic stuff i should be wearing a respirator right now you want to get one of these rollers it's made of metal so that the resin doesn't stick to it you can clean it just with some acetone um this will allow you to push out any air bubbles to make sure that you have a really good form-fitting product so what we're going to do now that the resin is mixed up is put on a light layer and then we'll lay on our fiberglass cloth [Music] i can tell you just from the amount of resin i'm using just on this first layer that i'm definitely going to need more than a quart [Music] when you're laying your fiberglass down you actually want to use a stippling method right so where you're kind of sticking it down you're not necessarily painting it on the cloth is very thin so once you start getting it down then you can start kind of painting it on for the next layer and now that we've wet it through we're going to use a tool to try to get out any air bubbles okay now we're just gonna go ahead and wet this through this is why vacuum infusion or even vacuum bagging is so important because it applies pressure and will allow the contours to be held so you can see that i just moved these air bubbles and they kind of come back so you just really need to work this when you do a wet lay-up pretty well got most of the air bubbles out so what we'll do is allow this time to cure and then we'll mix up another batch and then lay down a couple more layers because this will not be strong enough to hold a mold so we've allowed the fiberglass to cure overnight it's pretty hard which is great we're going to do at least one more layer for strength i think i'm actually going to finish out all this fiberglass i have so i'm going to mix up another batch of resin and this is why using the proper container is important because it's reusable okay same as before we're going to go ahead and add our resin and our mekp i'm going to do 48 ounces so that will be about 16 ounces or i'm sorry 16 cc's of mekp so we'll wet out the rest of the fiberglass and before i do the very last layer i actually need to mix in that wax so that it can fully cure so let's go ahead and get started should have a real respirator but this ought to be better than nothing because these fumes are super toxic in fact your body will eventually become allergic to it so just you know try to wear a respirator if you plan on doing this more than once in your life [Music] now what we'll do is add some wax to the mixture and lay the last layer of fiberglass on [Music] here [Music] definitely wouldn't have hurt to have a little bit more resin but we should be able to just roll it through and just get a thorough wet out regardless so let's go ahead and try our best really we just wanted that wax layer to form that barrier from oxygen so that it allows it to fully cure a common misconception that a lot of people have is the more resin the stronger the fiberglass piece will be that's actually incorrect there's a ratio of fiberglass to resin that makes the strongest possible part i mean i don't know what it is but that's why you use vacuum infusion it pulls the excess out and just puts just enough to wet it out you can see there's like it's bubbling up so there's quite a bit of resin here so i mean it's going to be plenty strong but it's not optimal but this is just a mold so it's not a big deal okay so this is fully wetted out we've rolled out all the air bubbles i'm going to turn on the heater and add some heat to try to get the cure it should cure in about three hours and then we're gonna pull the mold from the plug the door and everything should be good right we'll see i hope you guys are as excited as i am or nervous i'm nervous we'll find out see you guys soon hey welcome back so the fiberglass actually cured all night and i did that because i was working on this video here so it looks like the fiberglass is good it's nice and hard and i think that these layers of matte and the cloth will be enough to not compromise the mold i don't know i'm not a fiberglass expert i'm just showing you guys what i've learned and hopefully it's enough so now let's go ahead and separate this mold from the plug separate it from the door and we should be able to start making some stuff there we go [Music] so we have our mold now and there's some minor imperfections and stuff a lot of it we can work out but i'm going to clean up the wax and show you guys what this will look like then you'll see that we can just basically lay on gel coat and then a couple layers of fiberglass and should be able to pull just a mirror finished product a really really nice looking product so now what we're going to do is just like before we're going to apply some pva let it dry some wax and then we'll put on our gel coat a couple layers of fiberglass and we will have a finished product not perfect because the door wasn't perfect but that's what happens when you don't take the time to do the bodywork before you make the mold should be good enough though [Music] [Music] uh of all the times i should have wore a respirator that was it that just atomized all the resin so that's probably not a good thing but i'm gonna let that cure and uh probably hack my lung out and then we'll start laying the fiberglass we're just going to do two layers of the cloth and one layer of mat and it should be gucci is that cool is it cool when people say gucci i didn't show laying down the fiberglass because it's exactly the same as before i did one layer of the cloth one layer of mat one layer of cloth it's not extremely strong but i don't need it to be i want flexibility more than anything and it's cured i already popped it out and i didn't show that either it's exactly the same as when we pulled a mold from the door so let's go ahead and take a look at it huh pretty nifty right i think it looks pretty good it's not perfect you know um but we never expected it to be we'll be able to clean all the pva off and i'll trim it up to make it look nice and then we'll test fit it against the door [Music] and that folks is how you fabricate fiberglass parts i'm going to trim it up a little bit more with the dremel i'm going to actually use a sanding tip just to get a little bit closer but it fits pretty okay and now the 350z community has bolt on door skins i hope you guys enjoyed the video just check out my other ones like and subscribe i guess because that's what you do when you're a sellout thanks guys [Music] you

Channel: freedom fries

Views: 101,563

Keywords: 350z, z33, fiberglass, how to make fiberglass fenders, how to make your own widebody, carbonfiber, carbon fiber, diy fender flares, fiberglass mold, fiberglass wet lay, grassroots motorsports

Id: bJRkTVDLU3o

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020