Laying Up the Nose Mold

After completing all of the bucks it was time to do some major cleaning in the storage unit to convert it from a sophisticated paint booth to a world class clean room for composites lay up. After cleaning up we started laying up the mold for the nose.

Here Brett and Josh S. are applying the tooling surface coat to the buck. This surface coat will stay with the mold when removed to give us a durable surface.

Here is the hard part.... Use your imagination to visualize what laying up a fiberglass mold would look like. Because at this point we are very busy and very sticky, so using a camera is out of the question. Sorry...

Back with clean hands and fresh gloves we vacuum bag the mold to remove excess resin and to compact the fiberglass layers to reduce the internal voids, giving us a stronger and lighter mold.

Here the vacuum bag is now completely sealed and we are starting to remove air from the bag

After some of the air is removed we need to create pleats so that there is no possibility of the vacuum bag bridging over an internal corner. You can see Guy hard at work inspecting the pleats, he is our certified pleat master.

On this mold we achieved a perfect seal as the pump is drawing it's maximum vacuum, 18 in Hg or -60 kPa!