Has anyone tried infusing with caul plate over the lay up? What kind of results did you get?
Yup I like it and get great results. Obviously infusions take more time (30-60min instead of 5-15) and you need to be careful on the edges so you don’t get race tracking but it’s really nice to control the thickness of your panel. It really helps to get a low cps resin. I’m sure Riff will chime in because he is the master of double caul plate infusions.
What are you making?
bing
You know me well sir. Yes, done and done, even with core AND carbon fiber. No flow media cept in the front.
If flat plate, just oversize the composite 1/4" in each side, maybe 1/2" for infusion/vent side. Flow media jsut on the resin side. I put peelply strips around each side, just to made sure my plate doesn’t rip the bag (normally fr4 plates simply sheared…nice and rough edges)
I also add 2-5" peelply delay in the vent side, just to make sure eeeeverything is saturated. I clamp when the resin hits the EOP. Watch for racetracks on the side (hence the larger composite, undersized will allow channels on the sides)
so i suppose i could make a caul tool out of silicone, to the shape of my mold and use infusion process?
with silicone you will have the wrinkles of the fabric come through, because the silicone is soft, and will conform to the fabric under vacuum. Maybe a thermoformed plastic sheet?
Would you be so kind to explain what you mean with caul plate? As a spaniard I couldnt find caul in the dictionary.
Do you mean stuffing some flexible plate between the lay up and the vacuum bag?
Don’t worry, Caul plate doesn’t show up in American dictionaries either. It’s just a secondary plate you put on top of your laminate, creating essentially a two sided mold.
flat plate so the laminate is flat on both sides, and more or less even thickness all around.
@Riff42. I used your technique for laying up this unidirectional panel. The only thing missing from this picture is the vacuum bag we put on top. The panel turned out great, but it took 2.25 hours to wet out. We need to change our resin system to a faster curing resin. We tried the next panel with the same layout, but it cured before the entire part could wet out. Do you have any suggestions on how to speed up the infusion process while still getting the class A finish with the caul plate?
Thanks!
Im looking at doing a similar thing actually on a panel about 1.2m long x 500mm long by 5mm thick. Resin is about 150cp
What steps have you taken to stop racetracking? Im currently in two minds as to infuse across the 500mm length or to have a racetrack around the periphery and suck centrally like VARTM. Only thing is that I would need multiple suction ports on the part all of which may not be equal distance from the edge.
Any thoughts?
For the panels that I did, we had no racetracking. We left about .5" of extra material past the caul plate. By having this extra material present without the pressure of the caul plate, we could pull one vacuum across the part instead of having to worry about multiple ports. Best of luck!