I’ll be pulling them from the mold tomorrow afternoon.
I’m hoping they come out perfect. I got full infusion and left the vacuum pump on at 29hg for 4 hours after the part fully infused. This infusion went much more quickly than the first one i ever did, took 2 minutes to fully infuse.
I turned the vacuum pump off two hours ago and i’m still holding a lot of vacuum in the bag. This one sealed air tight 
Hope your parts come out OK, but not sure if that method of production would be that great if you ever wanted to think about selling?
The eglass parts pictured were contact moulded using poly resin, and took around an hour to make start to finish, and were ready for final finishing the next day
colored e-glass is sexy. I like those fork guards you made there.
yeah i’ve thought about production time also… I’ll make more molds and infuse about 3 molds with different parts in one shot. While those are curing under vacuum, i’ll be cutting up more fabric and bagging materials for the next parts, or cutting and finishing parts. Soon I should have around 15 to 20 different molds each a different part. I’d like to get set up on a big infusion table so i can lay 3 to 6 small molds out on the table at the same time.
Kudos for doing each of those parts in about one hours time.
Later in time when i get a shop, i’ll start using some VER and PER tooling gel coat again. For now i need to keep the odors down to a minimum with my neighbors. Odor suppressors won’t help their health.
I need to build a fabric rack and a bench with shelves to hold all the little things i use. Later on i’d like to have a seperate table for cutting fabric.
All the parts took around an hour…here in the UK poly resin thats odour supressed is easily available, and costs around the same as std stuff.
Did consider the vac process for making small bike parts, but cost of consumables and the fact its not any faster than contact moulding, meant it was a non-starter in commercial terms.
From a commercial perspective making these sort of parts, I think it might be worth looking at some sort of adaptation of the RTM process using resin tooling?
Parts pictured were part of a batch of quite low numbers (100s), so wasnt worth considering spending time and money adapting RTM process to make them faster and cheaper.
classic, what is contact moulding?
I’ll admit, i’ve got a lot to learn about composites and various methods of making parts. At least we all have this cool forum to come and learn at I wouldn’t even be doing this stuff if it weren’t for composites forums, especially this one.
As for my two parts i just infused, $#@%&^ #$@%. I don’t know exactly why the edges of my parts aren’t fully infusing, most of the edges come out with air bubbles and then also dry fabric. It’s annoying.
My mold has a female recess that is only 3/16 of an inch deep… those edges that go down are the areas that won’t infuse properly for me. I don’t know if my resin is too thick, the flow front is moving too quickly, or my resin inlet needs to be changed or have two resin inlets maybe. I am using 1/4" I.D. vinyl resin hose. Should i use 3/16" I.D. hose and have two resin inlets maybe?
I’m not over the top mad about it, but it sure would be nice to solve the problem.
This is my third infusion.
I sold my first carbon fiber parts yesterday…woo hoooo 
It was the first pair of guards i ever made too.
it might be because the edges of yuor mold are sharp and theres alot of pressure cutting the flow, try moving the medium closer to the edge
Here are a couple photos so you can get a visual of what the edges resemble. Sorry for the photo quality… best I could do.
I believe is talking about open molding, he probally sprays his mold with clear gel then does traditional open mold techniques, this a very quick method and results in a nice finish in a fast time, it wont be as strong as bag/infused parts but they are cosmetic so it doesnt matter
I had the green resin flow medium layed across the top of the whole thing so when vacuum gets pulled it sucks the flow medium down around the edges as well. I cover the first 80% of the part with flow medium, the remaining 20% is no medium.
I never liked the green with epoxy, it always infuses to fast and pulls to much resin out of the laminate. I found that with the green I was getting a 30 % RC but poor finish, and with the red a 40% RC with a good surface finish.
Good thing I didn’t buy a roll of green, just a few yards.
What is “RC” Hojo? Sorry but i’m still fairly new to all this.
it looks like bridging, use a rubber squeegie to push the corners in while bagging, leave you resin inlet open til you have got all the briging taken care of then close for full vacuum, then get all leaks. you also may need to cut your flow in the corners to help stop bridges. if you were using the red all the bridges would fill with resin, but with the green in pulls out the resin, thats why I dont use it
Resin Content
Thanks Hojo, i’ll try all that on my next infusion with these parts. I think you’r e right about bridging.