My name is Andy and I am new to Composites Central, thanks for having me.
I am in the Everett, Washington area and a professional CATIA/SolidWorks Jockey who’s been doing mechanical engineering/design in these 2 programs for the last 9 years or so.
I was introduced to composites about 9 years ago, and although I don’t work composites professionally, I do have a personal interest and have actually made some of my own tooling and parts a couple years ago. I am looking forward to sharing, learning and getting my gloves sticky again.
Hey, Andy!! I’m down here in south Seattle/Federal Way and am really just getting into this stuff.
If you would like, check out a thread that I started where I am journaling most of my work. It’s at a motorcycle forum which is appropriate because these are motorcycle parts…
I checked out your site and it looks pretty cool. Looks like you’ve been out on many bike trips and hopefully not breaking too many parts! At my last job I learned quite a bit about their ways of tooling and fiberglass wet layup. Nothing fancy but a decent foundation. Then I started doing small projects for them in carbon and really took a liking to the higher tech ways needed for this material. So, to date, I’ve done some layup of carbon on Renshape tooling and have created my own tool for small car-top, GPS style antennas. I did quite a few tests of different materials, resins and environmental aspects of doing room temp vacuum bagging. The most difficult part was temp control, especially in the NW, where my garage temps were in the 40-50 range during the winter.
I am currently working on a mobile camera system and made a small part for that using the camera housing as the pattern. That piece turned out pretty good. I will be making some identical pieces of this so hopefully I will be brave enough to start a thread on that. I am new to these forum things :).
Other projects in work but not started yet are an air intake for a buddy’s miata and I’d like to try my hand at a motorcycle rear fender. I basically want to take a stock rear fender (a small one to keep the mistakes cheap) and use it as a pattern for a tool then lay it up and see what happens. At some point I’d like to make some $$ on the side with this hobby. I also have a couple large pressure pots that I want to convert into small autoclaves and try that out. You can see my posting under equipment on this site for 2 other pots I am trying to offload. First priority is getting my garage set up.
