Z-TARD

As far as I can tell, those wrinkles are only in the resin, the cloth is nice and flat under them. I think after some reinforcement on the inside, I can just add some more rein to the exterior and then sand it down smooth. I'm not sure if the resin I used has any UV protection, if so I won't even need to clear coat. I also found a good way to get all the extra crap left over from the mold out of the dash. I took it to the car wash and blasted the inside with the high pressure spray and was able to get 80% or so cleaned out before I ran out of quarters. The inside surface of this thing looks sooooooo much nicer than the outside. Even under two layers of glass cloth, the CF weave still looks amazing. I hope the outside looks half as good when I'm done sanding and polishing it. If I had it to do over again, I would have used a female mold with vacuum bagging, as well as duct tape instead of spray on mold release agent. It's not even diificult by any stretch of the word to pull laminates off of duct tape. It's sickening how a $2.00 roll of duct tape will outperform a $12.00 can of mold release.....

The carnage: More pics:

Just finished trying to pop the dash off of the mold. It's a good thing the mold was made mostly of styrofoam, because I ended up having to claw it out by hand from the backside. What wouldn't claw out I had to beat out from the front, which was easy because the dash is so gosh darn flexible..... I definitely sahould have vacuum bagged this one, and should have covered the mold with duct tape, as one of the easiest parts to release from the mold was the small section that I had taped over prior to laying up cloth and resin. So at this point what I have is a very soft carbon fiber skin that would probably make a good cover for a real dash. The backside is still covered with chunks of foam and DAP. On the positive side, it is very light My options as I see them at this point are to either clean it up and add more cloth and resin to the back for reinforcement, or to start over from scratch and do it again the right way using the lessons I've learned from this one. I'll take some more pics showing the extent of the devestation and post them later. John, if you're up for a road trip, I live way up in Rancho Bernardo. Unfortunately I don't have much to look at right now, but maybe you could help me figure out the best way to salvage this thing. Mike

DAP is pretty useful stuff, it's just very time consuming, especially if the humidity is up because it takes forever to dry. I would definitely consider alternatives if I were making larger parts like doors or a hood. I peeled away the plastic sheet a few hours ago while everything was still tacky. I noticed that in the air gaps between the plastic and resin, little beads of moisture were starting to collect. I'm assuming this was off gasing of some kind from the epoxy, which smells a lot like almonds..... Anyway, the plastic came off pretty easily, but now I'm wondering if it was such a good idea to use it in the first place. Anywhere there was a wrinkle, that wrinkle filled with resin, there are also still plenty of low spots where the CF was just barely saturated with resin, but not completely covered over. I can see lots of wet sanding and rolling on of resin in my future prior to clear coating. I think vacuum bagging is really the only good way to cover a laminate with plastic and expect an even finish out of it. Lesson learned for next time. I checked it a few minutes ago, and the resin seems to have kicked OK, the surface isn't tacky anymore, and I was able to cut away some of the excess material with some heavy duty shears. In a few places the laminate actually seperated from the mold when I cut it, so the mold release agent seems to have worked out pretty well. I'll know for sure tommorrow when I try to pop it out. I took some more crappy cell phone pics which I will post as soon as they show up in my yahoo in-box (My regular digital cam is no longer on speaking terms with my computer) Mike

I agree. Although it may be a masterpiece of engineering, it looks like someone tried to make a huge cockroach float for a parade. Stick that engine and drivetrain in an Astin Martin, then we'll talk.

Had the day off today, so I finally decided to glass up my dash mold. In the interest of keeping time and material cost at a minimum, I decided to use it as a male mold, rather than create a female mold out of fiberglass from it. The part that pops off (hopefully) will be the final dash, minus a little touch up work. After spraying with mold release agent, I added two layers of woven glass cloth, followed by the final layer of carbon fiber. Before curing I also slapped on a layer of clear poly drop cloth. I wanted to bag the whole thing and vacuum all the air out, but got lazy and instead just smoothed the plastic drop cloth over the resin and cloth by hand. The idea here is that it will leave a smoother surface than letting it cure without the plastic cover. Hopefully this will save me some work later on when I'm prepping the dash for clear coat. Anyway, here's a crappy cell phone pic of the latest progress: The resin takes 24 hours to fully cure, more pics to follw once I peel the plastic off. Mike

A few years back when I used to work at Shelby in Las Vegas, they had an orange Alpine in their showroom in the front office. I'm guessing that this was one of the early ones converted by Shelby as it had a V8 in it, but unfortunately I don't have any specifics on what size engine it had, or what was done to it to make the conversion work. Looked like a very fun car, too bad I didn't work there long enough to learn more about it. Mike

Dude, that kicks ***! Are those Skyline tail lights? It looks like there may be a very subtle side skirt on it in that drawing, which looks very good, aggresive side skirts tend to look a lot like running boards sometimes. I think a narrow BRE style spoiler on the backside would look really good though.... Mike

Another option is duct tape. Both polyester and epoxy resins pop right off without any mold release.

I'd imagine that a few clay pots full of thermite placed in the right location would shave some weight off of that thing.......

I made the mistake of using some Berrymans Chem Dip to clean off some gun parts. No gloves, just holding the parts above the can and using a toothbrush to scrub off gunk. After about 20 minutes I noticed that my hands were tingling, almost numb. The skin under my watch and wedding band began to have a burning sensation shortly after that, so I took them off and immediately scrubbed my hands with hot water and soap. The tingling sensation gradualy moved all the way up to my shoulder before going away. I felt like crap for the next few days, a lot like having a hangover actually. The skin on my hands dried up and began to look a lot like a mummified corpse, a day later all that skin had died off and was flaking off in a powdery mess that looked like parmisan cheese. The apartment still smells like chem dip, although oddly enough the garage doesn't. The moral of the story: Always use gloves when using harsh chemicals like chem dip, preferably a full body hazmat suit with air fed hood, because chem dip is nasty sh#t. It does do one hell of a job removing cosmoline off of military surplus firearms though Mike

So what does cat taste like anyway? (Rhetorical question, I already know what it tastes like from a visit to Korea a few years back. Cat on a stick tastes just like chicken....)

I wanna hear about the return trip over that bridge

Seems like it would be more efficient with a standard con rod setup. That sliding bearing carrier in the center looks like a good source of friction. Maybe a good design for low RPM applications like generators or tractors. I wouldn't trust that design for high RPM though. Mike

Possibly some debris from either one of ours or the russians rockets. Theres a lot of junk up there from years of sending up expendable multiple stage rockets, some of it turns pretty colors as it burns up in the atmosphere.

A quick google search resulted in this: http://durafix.com/ I've seen products like this one (It may have even been durafix, can't remember) demonstrated at car shows, etc. Seems to work pretty well, especially for non structural stuff like filling holes. Might be worth a shot. Mike

They need to get that guy if they ever make a sequal to "Team America, World Police".