If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try Again!

I jumped into building the fiberglass fender extensions thinking I knew what I was doing.  I read some forums, watched some YouTube videos, said to myself “This doesn’t look hard!”.

Boy was I wrong.  Reading, watching, and doing are three very different things.  But hey, without trying, you won’t know what mistakes you’ll make,  therefore you can’t learn from them and work on improving your skills.

So this time I went in the totally opposite direction by over preparing and over engineering my plugs!

To get the angle right this time I installed the headlight bezels, slapped some painters tape on the side and marked off 1 inch increments from the bottom to the top of the fender.  At this point I start measuring distance between the fender and the bezel at those 1 inch increments.

I then marked the fender edge and the corner of the headlight bezel.  There was a 3/4 inch difference, which is why my originals looked so bulky up in front.  I determined that  about 1/4 past the headlight bezel would look good, and gently curved the edge 1/2 an inch.

While I was at it I made an outline of the header panel as well.

With my measurements, I beefed up the foam in the spots I needed it.

The next steps, there was no science to it, other than knowing my markings and taking it slow.

 

I started rough cutting the piece in order to get the general shape.  Once I got close I started test fitting the bezel and seeing where I have to cut more to get it to fit.  Once I was happy with that, I put some blue tape around the bezel and started shaping.

Getting there!

I worked them to the point where I was happy with the fit and over all shape.  I knew if I kept going I  would end up taking too much off and ruin them.  So I stopped.

Now I am ready to attempt to fiberglass once again!  I mentioned last time I tried epoxy with woven cloth, and it was really hard to work with.  Took a lot of resin to wet out the cloth, and the cloth never wanted to cooperate with the angles, so I had a lot of air bubbles and areas of heavy resin, and areas of not enough resin.

I read into chopped strand mat which is meant for polyester or vinyl ester resins.  The mat is course and almost like paper when you place it on your plug dry.

But it wets out really nice! and once it starts working with the resin the strands essentially melt to shape around the form.

Now to the best part.  Using epoxy resin before others really spoils you.  It’s fairly benign and leaves almost no smell behind, so you can do it in your house.  Vinyl ester? Not so much.

But did I learn that the easy way? Of  course not! I didn’t find out until after I glassed the plugs.

You want to know what else I learned?  Vinyl ester doesn’t play nice with dry floral foam!  Shortly after wetting out the mat, it started eating away at the foam.  Which doubled the nauseating smell in the house!

Did I ruin the  plugs? Did the fiberglass keep the shape?  Did we get extremely high from the fumes?

You’ll have to wait until part 2 to find out!