How to Hand Lay Real Carbon Fiber Wrapping / Skinning Tutorial

welcome back to another DIY video guys today I'm going to be showing you how to skin objects in carbon fiber now I'm going to be specifically skinning 3d printed parts but this process is pretty generic and it should work for most things so let's get started and so I've begun by gathering my main materials and on the right-hand side you'll see that I got scissors various grades of sandpaper exacto knife hobby knife blue masking tape some foam brushes they also notice some safety gloves here these are great for preventing carbon fiber slivers when you are handling the carbon fiber fabric of course we also have our 3d printed parts that we're going to be wrapping some spray adhesive we also have the resin and the hardener stir sticks we're going to need mixing cups measuring cups the packing tape and in the far back you can see a heat gun lastly the most obvious thing not pictured here is of course the carbon fiber fabric itself now we're going to take our 3d printed part or any part for that matter that we're going to be skinning and we're going to hit it with some 200 grit sandpaper and this is really important to take down the high spots on the part especially for 3d printed parts where the print head may have left over some excess plastic now that your part is smooth this next step is optional but I'm going to go ahead and do it anyways because I'm not sure if the PLA is compatible with the resin that I'm going to be using and so I'm going to grab my packing tape and this is just regular packing tape I'm going to cut it into strips and I'm going to lay it on top of the 3d printed part and the resin should not be able to eat through this packing tape and of course it will protect the part itself and now it's time to place your part on the carbon fiber fabric I'm going to be using a 2 by 2 twill weave carbon fiber and this stuff works fantastic for conforming to complex curves so it really makes skinning or wrapping parts very easy and we're going to be marking off how much of this carbon fiber we're going to be using for each part keep in mind that you want to have excess fabric you don't want to make your cuts too short because of course it's a lot easier to cut off the excess rather than adding more fabric on later in the process and we're going to be using our blue painters tape for this and the reason for doing this is that when we make the cuts we're going to cut down the center of the blue painters tape and this is going to prevent the edges from pulling and fraying and distorting your carbon fiber weave so now I have two parts to do so I'm going to mark off two big squares and then we're going to make our cuts and with your carbon fiber cloth now cut to size you want to coat your part in the spray adhesive and the trick here is to not go too heavy you want a nice light coat you do not want your glue soaking right through the carbon fiber you just need enough to get it to stick and from there you're going to be laying the carbon fiber cloth on top of your part and you're going to start from the middle and work your way outwards now this is very important because you do not want to work your way inwards and have the cloth wrinkle or bunch up and as you carefully lay the cloth onto your sticky part you are going to be using your hands to just work the part or work the cloth into all of the contours of the part and you want to be very careful with this as you do not want to push or pull too hard because you can potentially distort your weave and you'll be able to see that at the end through the resin because of course your resin dries clear at this point your parts should be completely wrapped and I cut off most of the excess fabric for my part there's still a little bit of extra still at the back but I'll get to that a little bit later and the edges on my part were nice and clean I was able to trim the excess like I said and use the spray adhesive on the bottom side of the part to secure any extra bits of carbon fiber cloth to the bottom like I said leaving me with a nice clean edge and I was able to do this with minimal distortion to the carbon fiber weave it's finally time to mix your resin and I've moved my project to the garage because things might get a little bit messy at this stage so now you're going to need your two measuring cups one for your harder and one for your resin and you'll also need your mixing Cup your also of course going to need the resin I'm using resin from systems three and we're going to be mixing these two parts to one resin two hardener by volume and if you've never worked with epoxy resins before one really important thing to take note of is the advertised working life of the resin and this is going to indicate how much time you have to work with before the viscosity of the resin increases so much that you can no longer apply it properly and what's even more important to note here is that the working life of your resin is very closely related to how much of the resin that you're actually mixing at once and so for example if you mix a gallon of this stuff versus an ounce of this stuff your working life is going to be decreased dramatically to the point where you may not even have a chance to use all of your resin before it actually hardens up so I'm working in metric and I limited myself to mixing 60 milliliters of resin total at one time to prevent it from hardening up too quick and I'm going to be using my foam brush to apply the first even coat to the part and the important thing to note here is that the resin is going to drip off of the edges of your part so it's really important to have your part elevated off of your working surface in my case you'll see that I've raised it off of my cardboard because if you do not do this and the resin drips between the cardboard and your part when the resin cures you're going to have a hell of a time getting that part off of your cardboard and now I'm back three hours later because the cure time on my epoxy is approximately five hours and this should leave me with a sticky tacky first coat and this is perfect because you do not want your first coat to completely dry if you let your first coat completely dry this means that you are going to have to sand your surface between the first and second coat which is time-consuming and unnecessary so if you just touch your part you'll notice that the surface at this point like I said should be a little bit sticky and this is the perfect time to apply your second coat I've went ahead and I've mixed another 60 milliliters of resin and I'm going to be applying it the same way that I did on the first coat I'm going to be using the foam brush and just painting it on using that foam brush to agitate the resin to release any bubbles that might get trapped in the resin after waiting a full 24 hours for my resin to cure we can now move on to the next stage which would be sanding and make sure that your resin has completely cured because if you move on to sanding before it cures you're going to gum up your resin and you'll pretty much have to start all over now if you take your part and you tilt it and look at it under certain lighting conditions you should notice that your surface does look wavy and this is completely normal and this is of course why we are going to be sanding so what you're going to do is you're going to grab your sandpaper I'm going to start off with about 180 grit sandpaper and a sanding block and this is really going to cut through that top surface and cut through all the high points on your resin it's going to leave you with low points that we're going to have to fill in with another coat of resin afterwards so keep in mind that while you're sanding you want to apply a nice even pressure with your sanding block the whole goal here is to achieve a very uniform surface and this means that you're not pressing too hard and especially you don't want to cut right through all of the resin and into your carbon fiber cloth if you notice that you're getting black or dark gray dust this means that you've sanded straight through your resin into your carbon fiber cloth and you should stop standing immediately other than that it's completely normal for your surface - now look dull and we are going to be working our way up in grit from the 180 to about 400 grit and smooth that surface out before of course we apply our next coat of resin these are the results after working our way up to the 400 grit sandpaper you'll notice that the whole part is dull with the exception of some very localized spots which are still glassy and these are the low spots on your part of which your sandpaper could not reach because it was of course stuck to your sanding block if you have scotch brite you can use that to sand into those low spots in order to get that next layer resin to stick properly and so the last thing you need to do or applying your next coat of resin is to very thoroughly clean your parts and this is critical because you do not want any sort of dust or sanding dust trapped into your next layer of resin you'll definitely be able to see that at the end of your project and it will look terrible so I like to wipe the parts down with a little bit of water and a clean cloth and then after that I use another clean cloth with some rubbing alcohol just to be sure that I got all that dust off now that your part is clean you can move on to mixing your next batch of resin and applying it to your part the same way you applied it the first two times with your phone brush get a nice even coating on to your part and do not try and focus on those low spots your epoxy resin should be self leveling and this means that it will take care of those low spots for you and it will flow into a nice even level surface on its own after playing the waiting game and coming back another 24 hours later you can reassess the surface of your part if you're happy with the surface finish and it's not too wavy you can move on to the final sanding and polishing in my case I went on to repeat the sanding and layering process about five times total so I put about five layers of resin on in order to get the results that I was happy with and then of course I could move on to the final sanding but before the final sanding and polishing it's a good idea to trim off any excess carbon fiber that you don't need and I'm going to be doing this with my rotary tool and on the rotary tool I just have a simple cut off wheel attached and I'm going to cut off that back piece of fabric that I no longer need moving on to the final stage of standing and polishing you're going to start off with a less aggressive grit of sandpaper something like a 400 grit and you're going to still use your sanding block so you maintain that nice even flat surface you're going to work over the part and let the sandpaper do the work don't press too hard because your surface should already be nice and flat the part on the right is what I started with and the part on the left is after that first round of dry 400 grit sanding after you finish dry sanding with the 400 grit sandpaper it's now time to move on to the wet sanding process and I'm going to be using my sanding block as I continue to do this so I don't induce any waviness in the part of course it's very important here that you keep the sandpaper and your part both wet during this process so as you can see in the background I have a bucket of water close by and this is just very convenient so I don't have to go running to the sink all the time as you've done in previous steps you are going to let the sandpaper do the work apply constant even pressure over your part while you're sanding and another important thing to keep in mind here is that you're not just keeping the sandpaper wet but you're keeping it clean and you're keeping your part clean you do not want to push any more dust or dirt into the resin so every once in a while dip your sandpaper back in the water and clean it off continue this process with the 400 grit wet sanding until you've removed all of the deeper scratches from the 400 grit dry process that you did previously and once you're satisfied with the results from the 400 grit wet sanding it's time to load up some 800 grit sandpaper and do the same process again soak it in water hit your part up with some water make sure everything is nice and wet and then of course use your sanding block to sand with the 800 grit wet sandpaper and at this point you'll notice more so than with the 400 grit that you're beginning to restore that shine and gloss back into the park it's looking a little bit more polished and this is exactly what we're looking for again you're going to continue to do this and continue to remove any of those deeper scratches and as you move up and grit like I said you'll notice a higher shine higher polish and fewer scratches in that surface after the Unruh grit wet sanding I made a judgment call and I decided to move directly to 2,000 grit sandpaper and of course I'm still using the sandpaper wet so again I wet my part I wet the sandpaper I kept my sandpaper clean using the sanding block letting the 2,000 grit do job I have induced more of a shine and more of Polish into this part and after a few minutes things were looking pretty good this is what the part looks like after being cleaned up with a clean cloth and some rubbing alcohol you'll notice a few things right away the part looks slightly glossy er than before but we're still not at that full gloss shine quite yet you'll also notice that the surface is uniform and no longer wavy and you don't notice any big scratches in the part we've gotten rid of all of those through that progressive sanding process that we just went through and now we're finally ready to polish our part and the one thing I can't stress enough here guys is you should thoroughly clean your part before you go ahead and polish now what I have here is just a standard polishing compound from Turtle Wax and it's for general automotive use and in drill I have chucked up a mother's mini power ball polishing pad and this thing is some kind of synthetic pad you may want to opt to use a synthetic wool pad or maybe a natural wool pad in your drill one thing to also keep in mind is that I'm using a corded drill which generally can achieve higher speeds than cordless drills so if you have a speed control on your corded drill make sure you dial thing down because epoxy resin is strong stuff but you can still burn through it with too high of a speed or if you stay in one place too long so what you're going to do is you're just going to spread some of that polishing compound onto your polishing pad and at a slow speed you're going to spread it around your part if you start off too quickly you'll just fling that wax around and make a big mess so as you can see I'm just spreading it around getting a nice light coat on the entire part and once the part has been coated then I can increase my speed and start polishing the part more effectively and as you polish your part you may find that you need to add more polishing compound so don't be afraid to do this just go ahead and dip your polishing pad back into the compound and add more as you need it you after polishing let the residual compound haze up before you wipe it off with a clean cloth these are my results after the first round of polishing as you can see there's a lot more gloss back in this part but I'm not quite satisfied and I'm going to hit it one more time with one more round of polishing and so after all that hard work this is the final result you can see that the part looks extremely glossy as we'd expect from carbon fiber and I'm really happy with the results keep in mind that I focused mainly on that front flat surface which is extremely smooth you might see some waviness in the rest of my part because I didn't spend nearly as much time or put nearly as much effort into the rest of it because it won't be visible in the final assembly lastly I started this project with a 3d printed part but this method should work just as well for wrapping any other part that you wish to be skinned in carbon fiber so I hope that helps you guys with your own project and if you'd like to see the project that I'm working on with these parts you can click on the link at the end of this video or you can check out the description below and I'll put a link in there as well as always thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe

Channel: Embrace Racing

Views: 309,990

Rating: 4.7644968 out of 5

Keywords: carbon fiber, diy carbon fiber, how to carbon fiber, how to wrap carbon fiber, how to skin carbon fiber, skin parts in carbon fiber, how to wrap parts in carbon fiber, custom carbon fiber parts, how to polish carbon fiber, fix carbon fiber, cover parts in carbon fiber, carbon fiber cover, hand lay carbon fiber, diy carbon wrap, wrap car in carbon fiber, make real carbon fiber, carbon fiber laminate, how to cover parts in carbon fiber, how to repair carbon fiber

Id: kxRU9P-kh9s

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2016