Thinking about skipping the tooling gel coat approach this time.
Gonna have to sand texture from the mould after I pull the plug.
To do this I’m planning on using a layer of brush on epoxy that is thickened with ez sanding light weight filler.
Then i will Brush on a layer or two of epoxy that has high density filler and silica.
Then lay up the reinforcement.
I’m thinking this will give me a easy mould surface to sand the texture away.
Will this work? Please any and all opinions.
Will the epoxy polish to an acceptable surface for a decent release?
Depends a little bit on the filler I think. I used microballoons to fill my polyurethane plug, and that didn’t really shine up nicely. Put a coat of the same resin on top, this time with calcium carbonate. Polished to an excellent shine, but wasn’t easy to sand.
In any case, I think you will get away with it if you are only using it for a couple of pulls. Is there a reason you can’t get rid of the texture on the plug?
Thanks for the reply.
The plugs are very very very expensive so I would rather do the work inside the mould. I just hope it all works
You better use a sandable gel coat.
I use this one for this purpose: http://www.axson-technologies.com/sites/default/files/doc_produit/en/gc1050-gc10-tdsi-gb.pdf
That stuff looks perfect!!!
typically you would use a surface veil for this technique. It works good but do not expect to get a high polish.
Update:
So far so good. Used a mixture of high density filler, graphite powder and fairing additive to epoxy. I achieved a very easy to sand brushable tooling layer. Worked great on the test piece. I would say 1’ square section block sanded to 600 in a mater of minutes.
I plan on spraying a surface coat of duratec to get a very high polish on the tooling surface. Kind of backwards but I’ve never really tried it this way before.
I mixed it
6oz epoxy
1cup high density filler
1cup fairing additive
Teaspoon of graphite powder
Dab of red coloring agent…
Downside I suppose is the "dabs of coloring agent differed between batches so I have a neat swirl affect of pink and red going on.
Anyways just wanted to keep people posted.