Hello everyone,
It's been a while since my last update. While I've had nothing but time for the last few weeks, I haven't had an income to allow for projects like this. I was able to scrape together enough to start experimenting. This will sort of be my attempt at relaying everything I've learned about fiberglassing in the hopes that someone will find it useful. I had two test pieces that aren't part of my actual suit that I decided to practice on. First up, a simple helmet.
To experiment, I removed all the tape from one side. This piece used 3/4 oz woven fiberglass that I got from a repair kit. This one went pretty disastrously. I wasted a bunch of resin by making batches too large, the woven stuff was hard to work with, and I ran out of resin and cloth so I only covered about half of the helmet. The result:
It looks pretty bad, but I was able to learn from it, and that was my goal so I'm satisfied. What I learned from this is that the resin has a hard time sticking to the tape underneath. It tends to ball up and won't soak into the fiber as easily. As long as there is a little cardboard underneath it does adequately.
The next piece was the marine forearm that I made to practice pepakura. I made this before deciding to model my own, so this was a throwaway piece. For this, I bought 1.5 oz chopped strand mat from a boat repair shop. The second time around was much easier, as I had some experience to draw from this time. It's not perfect but a big improvement. There's no before picture, but here's the result:
As you might be able to tell the heavier cloth takes away a lot of detail from the outside. In my case this is a good thing, because of the nature of the suit. It's so curvy and organic, I was thinking I would have to use a lot of body filler to round out the edges, but I may not have to. I still made some mistakes, including wasting a few ounces of resin.
What I learned from this one is that in this heat my working time is severely reduced. It's a high of 95 pretty much every day here, and I'm working in a hot shop. The resin container says 10 drops of hardener per ounce. I was putting in 6 and still only getting the 10-12 minute working time. I also learned about how much fiberglass it will take to do the whole thing: a lot more than I expected. The model's actual surface area is about 2.35 sq ft, and I ended up using a little less than 4 sq ft. I assume this is just due to the overlap it takes to make it smooth. In any case, I'm mostly happy with this result and soon you should see updates for the actual pieces. I'll leave you with this last picture to give you a sense of scale:
Thanks, I appreciate any input you have.
-Java
