Carbon Fiber Bodywork

Have you tried some air pressure and soapy water to find the Air leak? Maybe regulate the pressure down to 10psi or something, and spray the soapy water around.
Man you do some nice work there, everyone waiting for the Finished Products to be bolted to the bike.

looks pretty danged good (from oklahoma :lol: )!!


the red is kinda cool.

leon

I appreciate the help motorhead, and I'm just as excited to see some parts bolted on the bike too :woohoo:
The soapy water trick won't work for me unfortunately For one, its a vacuum leak, not a pressure leak, so I wouldn't see any bubbles from the soap. More importantly, because its a vacuum leak, any liquid I use to try and find the leak (if found) would get sucked into the laminate, and contaminate the resin. Thanks for the thought though! I can use any help I can get

Edit

Just realized you said to use pressure to find the leak. That would be interesting to try, pressurize the vacuum bag lightly and use soapy water. Like a hand pump or something to blow it up....

Yeah it looks good. As long as the pinholes are small enough for clear coat to fill them, I wouldn't worry about them too much.

So when are you doing a set of KZ650 bodywork? :woohoo:

Could you find any resin tint that is Kawasaki Green?

This is a cool method with the resin infusion. As someone who has worked with fiberglass, it would be nice to get the layup situated dry. Things sure get messy fast when you start slopping that epoxy resin around.

Looks real good from here.

I'll pick up some green tint today and give it a try. There are also hybrid clothes with the Kevlar dyed green that would look cool. I'm am curious to see how good the infusion works on the tail mould, but the mould still necessary some prep before its ready to be used. I'm not to worried about the minor pinholes, and if my next tank top comes out that good I'll be happy.
Tyler, I think you should give it a try I am all out of 650 body parts at the moment
Laying up the fabric dry is a huge advantage working with larger moulds. My next experimental panel will include the use of 3M adhesive spray to hold the dry fabric in place. If the resin dissolves the adhesive properly then I'm good to give the tank top another shot. I need to be able to hold the dry fabric in place while laying up and stay where I put it. Until later guys

Oh I'll give it a try, if you make me one of those catch cans, and walk me through the process. It'll give me something to do in the winter months. I'll definitely take my bodywork off this winter and make some moulds out of it before I send it all to get painted.

The next vacuum can I make will be 6" in diameter and use a simpler mounting system for the top. Give it shot Tyler! Even the disappointing failures are fun :laugh:

I picked up some green tint and set up another panel to infuse. Same basic layup schedule as before except I used 7oz fiberglass instead of 4oz. I mixed the exact same amount of resin I did before, except I mixed it all at once this time :whistle: and added the green tint:


its tough to judge how much tint you need. The amount of tint is too small to really measure with any accuracy, and it looks much lighter once it whets out the cloth than it does in the tub. It would make matching bodywork sets a bit of a challenge, unless I infused them all at the same time from the same batch

The laminate whetted out in 5:42, and I sucked up every last drop.... I should have had a 5% buffer to make sure there was enough left over, just in case. One very nice thing about infusing like this is once you figure out how much resin you need, its very repeatable. So no wasted material if you make too much, and no scrambling to mix more if you run short while the last batch is kicking off :pinch:


the color looks more teal green, not quite the brighter kawasaki green, but the effect is still cool


You'll notice along the right edge there is some of the cloth on the face of the glass that is not whetted out yet. I think this is a product of not having the vacuum line further downstream, that would continue to draw the resin across the piece. The fibers eventually whetted out (I coaxed as much as I could from the outside), but lessen learned.

I may give it a go, but it seems very hard haha.

It's not so much that it's hard, more that it is a very process sensitive endeavor. One small tweak in the process can mean the diffence between an acceptable part, and filling up the trash bin with expensive filler

Yeah thats why I'll wait until you have it down to a science so you can tell me exactly how to do it.

My two infused panels side by side. Starting to look like christmas :laugh: The first panel turned out better than the second did as far as surface pinholes. I have an idea why, but I don't plan on doing another test panel. Next should be a tail if I get a chance to work on the mould.