Now I thought I was making an air duct for the side of a race car, but it appears that instead, I’ve been making some wierd piece of plastic sixties furnatrue. A bright yellow Chaise for Chrstine Keeeler perhaps?
Well you can tell from this photo that I finally managed to complete the mould for the side pod tunnels. It took fully, five layers of CSM, 3mm of coremat, about 10 litres of resin and a number of extra layers at the edges but we got there eventually.
Remeber this is a mould, so it is the negative of the part required, and will actually produce a hollow duct with a curved inner wall.
In this picture the front of the car is towards the left, and the white panel below will be the outboard vertical face of the side pod. The yellow face, facing you will be the top of the tunnel, and the radiator will be placed diagonally across the end with the extra red gel goat.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. As I feared, the PVA release agent had raised the wood fibre texture on the hardboard which makes the curved section, and this was unwilling to release from the mould. The hardboard had a better grip on PVA/Mould than the adhesive that held all the hardboard layers had. As a result, while it would release from the mould in small sections the hardboard would then break up or delaminate. So we ended up having to scrape it off in layers after wetting it out with water. Imagine removing the heaviest, most overpainted wood chip wallpaper without the use of a metal scraper and you’re somewhere close. It took about three hours, using sharpened softwood mixing sticks. Also it left the mould with and interesting texture akin to that of Feaux Leather. I rubbed that back with 360, then 600 and 1000 grip wet and dry. Its not perfect… but hey its a race car!.
The other thing we did today was epoxy a 100mm strip of Kevlar down the underside of the floor moulding we made previously. Kevlar, especially when bonded in with epoxy, is ridgid and makes the moulding very hardwearing. This will be very important as the side pods will need to stand up to the odd glancing “rub” when in the middle of the RGB pack.