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 I have started the Mold Making Phase! - These are exciting times for sure. John Lee and I started laying up the molds earlier this week and it has been an eye opening experience for me. And that's an understatement! I mentioned to John that the job appears to be mostly tedious chasing of bubbles underneath the resin and that's the total truth! First spraying down a thick coat of gelcoat over our 12 coats of wax, while waiting for the gelcoat to set up we then pre-cut all of the fiberglass pieces for the side pods out of 1.5oz Mat. All of the sharp corners got a brushing of fumed silica paste and a strip of glass roving. We then layed the glass up by brushing on tooling resin and rolling the glass out with rollers. From that point on it was all about chasing the bubbles. I've written a longer article regarding this first week of mold making so be sure to click on the read more link.
 | Our first molds made were for the headlight covers. The making of those clear pieces will be covered in an upcoming entry. But as a teaser I will tell you that I am in the process of building a vacuum forming machine with heating elements, vacuum tanks, platens, molds, and all kinds of cool knobs and switches! In this photo we have masked off the headlamp areas with paper and tape. The waxed mold was then brushed with Gel Coat and left to tack up for 2 hours. Once the gel coat was ready, we cut sheets of 1.5ox fiberglass mat and layed them up 2 layers at a time. |  | These layers were left to fully cure and the process repeated with 2 more layers. This process took 4 days to complete. We left the molds to cure over the weekend and then Monday morning John and I popped them off with wedges. Actually they didn't even need wedges to pop them off, the wax is so slick that they literally slid off. Can molds be too slick and shiny!? |  | Our next step was to create the wheelwell inserts. John used 2 layers of 1.5oz mat to lay out 4 long strips of fiberglass with gelcoat. The idea is to place these in the wheelwells and build the body-sideof the molds against these to form a flange that will be bolted together. You will see more of how this functions in the upcoming weeks. |  | John spent hours and hours creating the gates (or dams as they are also known as) that will serve as the parting lines for the mold. The reason that a mold like this car needs parting lines is that wherever there is a 'draft' (or negative space) such as the side intake, you would not be able to remove the finished bodies from the mold without breaking them. So you have to take the mold apart in pieces. |  | A weeks worth of work nets us a whole bunch of gates, wheelwell inserts and other bits all glued on to my beautifully waxed plug...
|  | You can see that both sides are completed and ready to spray gelcoat for the left and right sides of the car. Once those sides are layed up, all those wood bits will be removed and the remaining fiberglass flanges will serve as the base for creating the opposing flanges. |  | One final beauty shot at midnight last night... Yes, this stuff takes a long time!
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