We spent the first half of the day on a trip to High Point to get some fiberglass. We got some 9oz fabric, some fabmat, and some resin and MEKP. We plan to make a fiberglass mold off of our existing body mold which will give us more options in how we make our body panels. Also, being as our mold is solid wood with body filler on it, we suspect that the wood blocks will eventually swell and shrink, leading to surface degradation. This will not happen on our fiberglass parts, so we will always have something to make more panels with in the future. The butterfly panel is almost done, but one area is giving me a huge amount of trouble. My design professor, Bong-Il Jin, is coming out tomorrow to look at it with me. Wayne is coming out tomorrow to help Aaron with the website, too, so it should be quite a productive day.
4 comments:
Hello, your project is quite amazing... but only one thing makes me wonder, if wood can resist the mefcanical stress, like doing 30-50km/day in a year... i think wood may crack after some time, have u conssidered to use a tubular aluminium chasis under/with the wood one, just to fasten things up? but any way u have a great idea, and if wood doesnt work very well, the same body can be made of fibler glass (cheap too). Well i hope every thing goes well! greattings from Brazil!
Marcos R. Strattmann
marcosstr@gmail.co
Hey Joe, it's Russell again (wearing out my welcome, I know). I just wanted to see if you plan on embedding reinforcement in the body molds, as they can/will flex and throw you measurements off. Rebar, heavy wire, and electrical conduit all seem to work well.
SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) is telling me to get busy with chores. Got to go.
Russell Allen
Marcos,
Using aluminum would be cheating! We feel confident that the wood will hold up because of the way we designed and built the chassis, but one of the biggest goals of this project is to find out. Thanks for checking in.
Russ,
It's always good to hear from you. We are a little concerned that the wood body mold is going to start to deteriorate as the wood swells and shrinks, so we are going to pull fiberglass panels off of it in case we want to make more panels later. As of now, these fiberglass panels will be built up with several layers of fabmat to a thickness that will be great enough to resist flexing and distortion to an acceptable degree. I will keep you posted if we change our mind/plans. Talk to you soon, buddy.
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