Channel: Matthieu Libeert

Category: Howto & Style

Tags: youtubemistakehow tofiberepoxywrinklesfailresinpolyestercarbonfailuregelcoatcastingtutorialstyrencrazingalligatoringmakemouldstyrene

Description: Hi everyone, As a small sequel of the previous upload being the making of the 100 million Youtube button out of carbonfiber: youtu.be/t7SLbSG6IV0 The most important lesson you can take out of this video is that failing is an option. I’m not afraid to share my mistakes as well. In the full video it was a small part of the video with not that much detail about it, as I already had in mind to make a more detailed video about it, being this one. The thing that went wrong is that the gelcoat started to react with the pattern. Ruining my plug and mould as well. Costing me a bit of material but, more important, a lot of hours of labour preparing the plug to a nice finish. The reaction was probably caused by the primer being used before the 2K clearcoat. It is general knowledge in composites not to use a 1K paint as a finish for your plug before making a polyester based mould on it. A solution for this is to add a 2K clear or topcoat on top of your fillers/primers used on your plug. That way you are creating a barrier between your 1K preparations and the polyester coming on top of it. Another solution would be to use a PVA or polyester based filler to make a barrier. Some other solutions would be to use Epoxy gelcoat to make the mould or like in the full video; make a silicone mould to cast a new plug out of a solid material you could even finish a bit more like a polyurethane or epoxy casting before making a new mould again. What probably caused the problem is a cheap primer I hadn’t used before under the 2K polyurethane clear. I already used the same recipe on an other project without any problem. So this is not really a problem of the gelcoat or the system, but a build up of errors in the plug. The cheap primer and probably a too thin layer of 2K caused the styrene in the gelcoat to react with the styrene in the 1K primer that wasn’t probably fully cured. As well a to thin layer of gelcoat on some points. If you look for “aligatoring gelcoat” on google you’ll find a lot of examples and more detailed information if you want to. The way to recover such problems is adding a thin layer of fiberglass and cheap regular polyester resin on top to create a shell so you can remove all the gelcoat in one go with your fiberglass shell and hopefully still have a good plug. In my case the plug was destroyed as well. Trying to peel of the thin layer of gelcoat might cause more problems than adding a shell over it to remove it all at once. In case you want to find the products used in this video, you can find them on following website: easycomposites.co.uk For more of my projects make sure to follow me on: Facebook: facebook.com/MAT2COMPOSITES Instagram: matthieu.libeert twitter: @matthieutje65 web: mat2composites.com