Here’s some random pic’s.
Glass setup/flatstock
Preform
Peelply
Flow Media
Perimeter and lateral feed
Vacuum lines in place, and initial debulk.
Secondary vacuum/clamp
The basic setup before pulling resin.
Hi nice pics Finite Tech. in the first pic, is that your vacuum pump sitting on the back bench ?
Whats the blue tape for?
is your “peelply” actually breather? (polyester fluffy stuff?) hard to see in the small pics.
Looks…interesting.
paulmn: That’s a marvac pump and is very robust. It’s an oil type case and it works really well. I’m at just a few feet above sea level and usually have pegged guages showing 30 + inches. I’m going to switch up to something that doesn’t put out vapors(when open to atmosphere) on the next purchase though.
drtcmm : I use the tape for managing fabric. I tape the fabric before cutting it out leaving about a 1/4" on the laminate side. It makes it really easy to manage the fabric without things trying to come apart. There is some in the middle of the pieces on the one mold. That is where the fabric transitions from the tooling surface vertically and ends. The fabric has some relief cuts just off of the transition so I used tape to make the fabric stable.
riff42: It’s the fabric peelply. The main flow material in the next pic is actually the fluffy breather material and the blue mesh is to get the resin to the part in areas that are farthest from the feed channels so that the part is infused equally from it’s edges. I’m using the breather instead of the mesh across the whole part because it’s really slow and allows the preform to pull resin ahead of the resin front in the breather material (I like the slowest possible infuse). I still throttle the initial resin pull though. It wouldn’t work on anything bigger than what you see because of it’s permeability. On a thin piece of flat stock I can get about 7" to 8" of resin travel with latteral feed. I always cycle vacuum and debulk which makes resin travel even slower. Would be a little better i guess with a perimeter feed and centrally located vacuum. With good throttled control of the resin on the initial pull and a slow as possible infuse I usually always get a really nice part with a perfect surface and no pinholes or dry patches. I also do the double bag for clamping behind the resin front and no issues with air leaks when I have to compact the preform into the tight details of a mold after it’s under vacuum, the bag “will” have little micro punctures. Double bagging has brought it full circle. Otherwise I only use the fluffy breather material for it’s original purpose and also to manage resin on the vacuum side of the mold.