mold flanging

its one front fender from my bike and the air ducks

a good sharp pair of sheetmetal hand shears, a roll of Aluminum sheetmetal “flashing” from Home Depot. Resin will not stick to their sheetmetal so there is no need to wax it. Use some modeling clay on the edges of the part to fill gaps. If you take your time with the clay and use tools to shape the clay it will turn out good. I use a metal ruler that is flexible for trimming the excess clay.

All other flanges i use mdf and gel coat the mdf and entire plug after the flanging is completed. Then i wet sand and polish the gel coat. I also mix in some Duratec clear addative with the gel coat to make it easier to sand and not clog up the sandpaper. If you use this method you can use bondo body filler to fill the gaps, then shape and sand smooth before spraying on the gel coat.

any fotos fastrr?

Here are a couple photos of examples of plug flanges.

The hood scoop on the white board - this is 3/4" plywood that we bondo’d smooth, and then white gel coated. We will pull the mold right off the polished white gel coat. We are using modeling clay to fill the gap between the scoop part and the board.

The car fender is a plug. It has 3" and 4" flanges all the way around the perimeter. Again we used white gel coat and will sand and polish before making the mold. 1/4" mdf was used for the flanges, they are bondo’d and hot glued to the backside of the fender. Gaps were filled and leveled with bondo, then block sanded flat and smooth.

The aluminum sheet is the home depot stuff found in the roofing dept. resin won’t stick to it and it works well for making contoured flanges. I hot glue it to the backside of the original part5 for plug construction.

post one please with flanges.

Here is a plug i am working on. I use that very thin aluminum sheetmetal flanging. I attach it with a hot glue gun, then clay all the edges. I also use the same metal for covering all the holes in the trunk. You can’t vacuum bag the plug/mold lay up this way. If you need to vacuum bag the actuall plug while making the mold then you need mdf that has been sealed with a surface coat.

I am going to vacuum bag another mold i am building…using mdg flanges.

cut the sh*t out of my finger today on that thin sheetmetal… like a deep razor cut , almost took off the tip of my finger.

note: be careful around sheetmetal!

Just finished digging carbon splinters out of a cut in my arm, be careful with carbon sheet too.

I have had a couple carbon tatoos on my hands for a good 8 years now from cuts. I kinda like it actually.

the amazing thing is it doesn’t hurt. It hurt for the first hour and dropped blood on the shop floor and door. Didn’t get stitches as for it being just the finger tip i didn’t want to shell out $500 for the ER. That’s what i get for trying to force a mold wedge between sheetmetal and the mold.

Finger is 90% healed up… i lost the skin flap/tip skin of finger but it grew back to normal… pretty amazing there is no flat spot.

I’ll be working on the trunk molds more this week or next.

I love free health care in New Zealand, that is all.

Same here, although we pay roughly 100 euros / month per person, children are free.

This will give normal healthcare. No facelifts, however. (unless the skin flaps are so big you cannot see anymore…)