Yesterday another 4 layers of cloth were vacuumed bagged on the previous days work – a little easier second time arround.
Filler was made to fill some of the gaps where the corner pads are to be placed. This had to be done twice as some numpty got his maths wrong on catalysing the resin … all good experience.
Today, well deep breath as the balsa panel was ready to expoxy in – all the planning helped, but as ever more challenges presented on the day, one the wind got up and blew the micro fibres everywhere whilst mixing the epoxy. Secondly positioning the balsa panel laden with 1.5 Kg of epoxy was slightly more tricky.
Epoxy bled onto the vacuum bag, but there was no going back, best efforts were made to seal the vacuum bag, and the pump siwthched on. Leaks were addressed and the vacuum valve showed a good vacuum :
Looking good, so a vacuum gauge was fitted to the other side of the setup, and this read a little lower, no the less better than would have been possible with props.
The setup was left and fingers crossed.
Later in the afternoon it was noted the vacuum gauge had dropped slightly, so the seal on the vacuum bag was revisited, after much stretching and pressing the vacuum was improved as shown below.
That’s about as good as it gets, bust a pity it was in place while the epoxy was wet, hey ho. The pump has been on for about 6 hours so it will soon be time to leave it, and then tomorrow try and peel all the layers off to see how the panel looks !