Here are a couple photos of my latest project. It’s a flat panel supported by 2 arches constructed using 5.5oz twill weave, 11oz unidirectional, and aerocore. If anyone is interested in fabrication photos or details, let me know.
Also, if anyone has any suggestions for preventing minor pinholes that does not involve post mold work I’d appreciate it.
-Thomas
looks quite good, altho abit “flat” more depth and that would be spot on!
Good work
as for the pinhole, i would like to know too
well, I infuse my table tops, making sure I have tons of gel time, along with a large peel ply delay line, so the tows get fully saturated with resin before I clamp off the injection line. Last time I ran out of resin 3 times, and got air in my line. Go me.
However, I now have a good idea for the legs!! 
ps: how high did you make yours? My first one was waist high, but I know coffee tables are normally shin high…
Thomas,
thanks for sharing the photos and info.
And yeap, I’d love to know & see more of the “how to” process. As soon as I finish my actual project I’d love to try something similar for my house.
Cheers
Fernando
I’ve attached a couple of photos from the fabrication process. The first is of the lower side of the table top. The layers of aerocore can easily be seen from this side (note the cutouts for the legs). The second photo is of the one of the legs being layed up. It is constructed using 2x4’s and Lexan. This is the first time I’ve used this type of tooling, and I say it was mostly successful. There were some issues, including flattening of the arches and getting everything straight.
The table’s outer dimensions are 4’x2’x1.5’. It can support over 150lb and weighs in at just under 7lb.
iMation, do you have an example of a piece with more “depth”, and any suggestions on how to achieve it?
riff42, I made my table using a typical wet lay up and vacuum bag technique. I have yet to really look into infusion. If fact, I’m still fairly confused about the details/benefits of it :).
I have a quick question about aerocore
What is it and when can you use it? I recall TET saying infusing it is dumb since it’ll soak up resin but someone else saying its fine. What’s the consensus on this?
Trying to be simple as I can…infusion vacuums out the air first, resin is then entered in from one side, as it pushes the remaining air out towards the vent. Thereby replacing all void areas with resin. Once the part is infused, the resin line is clamped shut, and the excess resin is also sucked out, along with any trapped air bubbles in the resin.
Obviously the science is much more detailed than that, along with each part’s specific technique. You can also do a 2 sided mold without trapping air bubbles in the resin. Remember, once there is an air bubble in the resin, and in the fabric, it’s very hard for it to find a way out. All the fibers and tows will trap it inside the part. The surfaces are very hard as well, since the resin has to go through alot of fabric before it finds the vacuum line.
Takes a bit more time, and materials, but the only resin you deal with is mixing it in the bucket, and putting a tube into the bucket! No messy fabric that sticks to everything! No cleaning up 10 tools trying to squeegie the air bubbles out of the wet fabric.
etc
etc
etc.
Caynon, I think TET was talking about coremat, which I belive is just a nonwoven/random mat of glass. It’s thick. Meant to add bulk to a piece, and that means it sucks up resin. Aerocore seems to just be a foam core of sorts.
Biggest benefit for me is there is almost no resin handling. Mix it in a bucket, degass, stick a line into the bucket. Handling epoxy used to give me nasty headaches and make me very irritable, infusing lets me keep doing composites - which is something I enjoy.
Thanks for all of the replies!
Canyon, aerocore is essentially a flexible, hexagonal foam core that is about .010-.015 thick. It is used to add thickness to the material in order to increase the moment of inertia (bending stiffness) of parts without significantly increasing their weight. It does absorb some resin. This isn’t a big issue when I’m doing a wet lay up, since I can control the amount of resin in individual layers, but it does lead me to believe that it would not work well for infusing (unless you didn’t mind the extra epoxy weight).
Fan 'O Zakk, about degassing the resin. How do you go about this? I’ve built a small vacuum chamber out of PVC to play with this idea, but every time I try it all it does is condense the gas into larger bubble near the surface of the resin. It seems like the surface tension is just too much for the vacuum to overcome. This is with pulling a vacuum of 25" Hg. I’ve considered adding a magnetic agitator, but am not convinced this would actually work.
Raise the temperature of the epoxy. When I degas I dump in the freshly mixed aerated resin into a glass jar. I then pull a vacuum and get tons of tiny bubbles that don’t pop. To get rid of them there I dunk the whole container in hot water and it lowers the viscosity enough to rid the mixture of bubbles
degassing…pull the vacuum…wait…
the lower the vacuum, the longer it will take!!! You have to wait till the bubbles go away. Takes me about 30min per 1000g batch of epoxy in a 1qt tub.
i would imagine the larger surface area would take less time, vs. using a tall resin tub (like a cup vs bowl)
But the key word is…WAIT!