Kz1000 Carbon Fiber Fuel Tank

Now fellas, no self depreciation necessary here; thats my job in this thread!

Holy crap that was hard! I'm not sure what's going on, but for some reason the PVA is bonding to the primer, and it makes it a son of a bitch to demold these large parts. But I persevered, and conquored non the less. May I present the right half of the top mold:

And here are both halves of the mold :woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo:

The top mold assembled

The top and bottom molds together

I am very happy to report that I found no easily identifiable defects in the face of the mold, it is smooth and of great importance, the emblem holes look perfect. Now, I think I've earned some time to sit with an adult beverage and admire my experiment

Nice work. Is it too late to ask for a mold of a tank with a flat space on top? I need some place to sit when doing highchairs. :laugh:

Thats just way too cool .



I'll be watching u, my man.

Thanks, my brown eyed friend I'm off to make my first tank related part, a tank bottom. One thing I haven't touched on yet is the seam as it relates to thickness. Since I molded off the stock tank and flanged off the steel seams, I can't make the composite seam any more than half as thick on each part, or I may run into to much of an interference fit. In retrospect, I should have forseen this, and taken appropriate measures to correct it prior to laminating th mold by making the steel flange thicker. If it is an issue with the first tank, I'll have to remake the tank molds. Not my idea of fun, having to redo 30 hours worth of work, but I could do it quite a bit faster a second time around :S

porchev914 wrote:

Thanks, my brown eyed friend I'm off to make my first tank related part, a tank bottom. One thing I haven't touched on yet is the seam as it relates to thickness. Since I molded off the stock tank and flanged off the steel seams, I can't make the composite seam any more than half as thick on each part, or I may run into to much of an interference fit. In retrospect, I should have forseen this, and taken appropriate measures to correct it prior to laminating th mold by making the steel flange thicker. If it is an issue with the first tank, I'll have to remake the tank molds. Not my idea of fun, having to redo 30 hours worth of work, but I could do it quite a bit faster a second time around :S

Couldnt you just section the mold you have? No that would probably be more work than redoing the whole mold.:S

Unfortunately elfmagic, I couldn't section the mold and guarantee fitment between the two halves of the tank. It would be better, cleaner to start over. Really, I would only need to redo one of the molds, so it wouldn't be the end of the world. I decided to use 3 layers of carbon for the tank bottom. I ended up mixing 14.5 oz of resin for the layup, but a signifigant amount was reabsorbed by the breather/bleeder material. I am interested to see the finish on the mold side of the piece, because I threw a little something into the mix....some pearlescence :ohmy: I threw in about 1/2 a teaspoon, and found out it was ALOT. I needed maybe 1/4 of that, as the resin looked almost milky white. I didn't know!!! I got everything on, and I noticed I had alot of resin drips down the flange of the mold. No worries, I wiped it down real quick with an acetone soaked rag, then started applying the bag, and thats when I ran into a big problem. I hadn't cleaned all the resin off perfectly before I started to stick on my vacuum bag with sealing tape. Thats when I learned that sealing tape doesn't stick to resin, and once it has resin on it, it doesn't stick to anything, and you cant clean the sealing tape. To make matters worse, I had used all the sealing tape I had left of this bag, so I HAD to make it work, or risk loosing $60 in materials. I spent another 20 minutes trying to seal up the bag, and managed to get the vacuum up to 18" Hg. 9 psi..... not the best, but better than 0 :woohoo: When I do the next layup on this mold, I will run some 1.5" masking tape along the bottom and remove it when I'm ready to attatch the bag to eliminate the frustrating problem I had.

Tomorrow I need to order resin and carbon cloth becasue I am out of each. A few other odds and ends, but the resin and the cloth are the big ticket items

i hope everything turns out nice adam!
i know you must be stoked.i get excited just looking at the pics,kinda like the first girlie book i seen.:laugh: :ohmy:
haha

leon

Thanks Leon! I'm working on stripping the mold now.....and all that excess resin completely soaked the bleeder material and made it a blanket of compacted resin reinforced with polyester batting :laugh: And it is proving to be a stubborn adversary to remove :blink: I AM excited to see how this part turned out. I love demolding parts, it's like unwrapping a present! I am especially interested to see how the pearl looks in the resin. I almost used the glow in the dark powder instead, but I'll save that for another part.... maybe my first tail...

porchev914 wrote:

I am especially interested to see how the pearl looks in the resin. I almost used the glow in the dark powder instead, but I'll save that for another part.... maybe my first tail...

you sir are a wildman! :laugh:

an unstoppable force of nature!

keep it up,
leon