Okay, everyone is well aware by now that I decided to use fiberglass as a medium in this build. I won’t get into all of the reasons why again to save everyone the boring details.
If you are really interested in knowing more, read all of my posts again! I love seeing my traffic stats spike!
But the reality is that I have never ever ever fiberglassed before, so if you have never done something before it can be quite intimidating! So I started reading articles and then I started watching videos on YouTube trying to learn before I actually started working with product.
As great as YouTube can be, there are a shit ton of horrible videos out there. You have to be extremely careful what you pay attention to and what you should just shut off right away. No offense to anyone, but if your video starts off with some loud obnoxious euro techno shit music I’m shutting you off.
So after some false starts I finally came across a YouTube channel I really enjoyed, GasserGlass Channel. This guy is the real deal. Down to earth and tries to teach you the right way of fiberglassing car parts.
So I went ahead and took the plunge!
I heard a lot of good things about www.fibreglast.com. Not only the quality of their products, but also the affordability. Since I’m doing this work in the winter time I decide to go with epoxy resin. The fumes while applying the resin are not very noxious, nor is the smell as bad as it cures.
I went with their 25 minute hardener so I can try to work with the resin longer since I am a newbie to this.
I went with 10oz weave cloth for the fabrication, so I cut enough to cover the piece. I would soon find out the hard way that this is way too much cloth!!!
I covered the floral foam in a light coat of epoxy resin so I can stick down the cloth and then start wetting out the cloth.
What a big freaking mess! I tell you. The resin went everywhere it wasn’t supposed to, and the cloth didn’t want to stick, lay flat, or cooperate in any way.
I hindsight I really think I should have coated the foam with the resin and let it harden up. That would have given me a nice hard shell to work with. Another think I would have done is cut smaller strips instead of trying wet out the the big pieces in the smaller grooves.
After working it, I think I got two half way decent pieces to work with. Yeah, there will be more cutting and sanding in certain spots. Certainly more than I wanted to, but for the most part I am trying not to beat myself up too bad since it is my first time.
Next steps will be to let this cure at least a few days and I will do some fitting on the car and make some cuts and clean up so pieces I am not happy with.
Then we start the process again!
