i wish every composite project was this easy.
-wrap the core with carbon sprayed with adhesive
-wet the fabric out
-brush some on the mold halves
-put the mold halves together
-clamp it up and what i got was very little air entrapment and good fiber to resin
beauty! can you post pics of your tools?
the fiberglass molds are for the core and were made from the plastic molds
looks great, is this the first set of blades you’ve made? do they perform well?
testing is in progress
Your helicopter is going to weigh almost nothing! Blades are looking good.
how much pressure do you know what to use on the sandwich? this process could also use rtm. Those blades look awsome mate.
Are the edges of the blade the fabric joints, or did you wrap the blade before putting it in the mold. If you have a fabric joint (top and bottom layers with core between, then pressed) on the edge, it can delam at high-speeds and destruct.
the core (hard syntactic foam)is approximatley the dry fabric thickness smaller than the mold. on this part it looks like i ended up with 65:35 fiber to resin. RTM is a consideration but if i can get consistent results by compression then its a less involved process.
Riff, the fabric starts at the trailing edge then wraps around the leading edge and ends at the trailing edge so we’re ok.
thank you for the feed back. i value your criticism because im definetly on the learning curve
What resin did you use? Are those parts right out of the mold?
epoxy
the ends had to be trimmed. the leading and trailing edge is basically “as molded” with the exception of a couple wipes with 800grit for parting line flash. the trailing edge pushed out several individual fibers when i compressed but a small step here in the metal production molds i hope will clean this up. the surface finish is a reflection of the PVA