Hey guys its been a bit quiet in here lately, I normally just read but thought I’d post to let you see what I’m up to.
First up is some carbon swingarm covers for my 02 R1
Here’s the swingarm, first I made it looked braced by using some cardboard, hotglue and bodyfiller. Smooth off the body filler and give it a coat of paint.
(I’ve already carried out the below process in this pic, hence the state its in!)
So now we kind of have our part but we can’t take a mold directly from what we have here otherwise whatever we take from it won’t fit over as a cover. He’s the chalenge then, we need to build up a surface here which will equal the tickness of the carbon part, there are several methods but I do it as follows;
- Wax the swingarm and then lay over some plain weave material and wet out with PER.
- Skim a thin layer of body filer over the surface and then sand and paint.
- Peel off the plain weave part.
- Flange the part then apply mold release then make a mold from it
Damn it sounds so easy when you write it down but it takes SOOOO long to get right.
Anyhow, here is the part we’ll be taking the mold from in primer
Here are the beginings of doing the other side, this one is a lot more complicated as I want to retain the chain guard so we’ll need to cover to fit over the top of it. Again we use cardboard and hotglue, I’ve also used one of my favourite materials here which is expanding foam used by builders to fill cavities in walls. I’ll also be making some guards for this side without the chain guard factored in.
