Skinning up (adventures with carbon fibre)

Work on my bonnet continues, but i wanted to show you what i have been up to in between. We all know about Carbon Fibre and how it looks, but whats it like to work with? How easy is it to use/shape etc etc? The only real Carbon Fibre work i have seen on MG's is the work done by Ariel, now obviously his skills are way above mine. However after watching a couple of vids on youtube I found myself wondering just how hard is it? and so my journey began:

First stop was Ebay, where I won this auction for a 79 cm squared piece of material at a cost of £10




I decided to start with the basics and "skin" an object , and after hunting around in my garage that object was a rear light:




"keyed" it up with some rough sandpaper:




Cut the Carbon Fibre to fit:




now coat the light with resin and wait for it to go to a "tack" and then place the carbon fibre over it and shape it to fit the light, tape the loose ends of Carbon Fibre with masking tape on the underside of the light. Once your happy with the positioning of the Carbon Fibre apply a coat of resin over it




Once the resin is dry, go over it lightly with some sandpaper (if you go through the resin to the material underneath you've gone to far ) to remove any high spots. Now apply another 3 coats of resin, each time waiting for previous layer to dry before you apply the next. Once the 3rd layer is dry it's time to get out the sandpaper again, I started with 120 grit then 600, 800, until finishing off with 1200 grit:




now just coat with clear laquer, or use a finishing polish and you get:




final thoughts:

For a first attempt i don't think its that bad, but if you look closely at the pictures you can see i made some mistakes along the way. Without making mistakes you'll never get better, i'll learn from them and try to do better next time. Obviously i won't be fitting this one to my car, i just wanted to get hands on with the material and the processes involved. For those wondering why you would fit that to your car anyway, with the added strength it would be easier to cut 2 circular holes directly into the light unit without the plastic shattering, and once that's done i'd say your 80% of the way to making your own Carbon Fibre quad light fitting. As an exercise in killing time it certainly worked anyway.

nice attempt............I use to be a fibreglass laminator when I left school,but didn't do anything fantastic.......we used to have serated rollers to work the resin in once it had been applied with a brush......experimenting with different amounts of catalyst was interesting,,,,,,,to mucha and you would see smoke coming of the resin :broon: .......anyway great job keep it up