Obviously paralleling the "Dirty Moldless Composite" thread, I'd be interested in hearing from folks with experience with or ideas about relatively quick and dirty, low-cost, low-labor, and low-expertise ways for a homebuilder to produce *molded* composite parts ideally with minimal final finishing required
One approach that has already been mentioned in other contexts is minimizing the parts count and maximizing interchangeability or at least common cross-sections so that the same molds can be used to create multiple parts. For constant-chord surfaces, these could be as simple as female molds of waxed aluminum or hard plastic sheet perhaps with the external formers hinged at the leading edge. Open the formers so the sheet almost flat, do the layup on the waxed sheet, add non-stick plastic sheeting on top, close and clamp the formers to hold the mold leading edge down, insert an inflatable sausage of duct-taped plastic sheet, inflate with a shop vac to press the layup against the sheet and squeeze out excess resin, let cure.
Except for very long wings, I'd be temped to make the mold long enough to do an entire wing panel skin or the longest control control surface in one go. You might even be able to do the final assembly in the same mold, adding spars, ribs, reinforcements, etc. to the cured wing skin just slightly opened for access and then closed to cure. A fuselage would be harder to do this way and a moldless approach would probably makes more sense, but molds could also work with a simple shape to make a vertically or horizontally symmetrical fuselage with top and bottom or left and right halves made in the same mold(s) and then glued and taped together.
I would love feedback on this approach or suggestions of other approaches worth considering.
One approach that has already been mentioned in other contexts is minimizing the parts count and maximizing interchangeability or at least common cross-sections so that the same molds can be used to create multiple parts. For constant-chord surfaces, these could be as simple as female molds of waxed aluminum or hard plastic sheet perhaps with the external formers hinged at the leading edge. Open the formers so the sheet almost flat, do the layup on the waxed sheet, add non-stick plastic sheeting on top, close and clamp the formers to hold the mold leading edge down, insert an inflatable sausage of duct-taped plastic sheet, inflate with a shop vac to press the layup against the sheet and squeeze out excess resin, let cure.
Except for very long wings, I'd be temped to make the mold long enough to do an entire wing panel skin or the longest control control surface in one go. You might even be able to do the final assembly in the same mold, adding spars, ribs, reinforcements, etc. to the cured wing skin just slightly opened for access and then closed to cure. A fuselage would be harder to do this way and a moldless approach would probably makes more sense, but molds could also work with a simple shape to make a vertically or horizontally symmetrical fuselage with top and bottom or left and right halves made in the same mold(s) and then glued and taped together.
I would love feedback on this approach or suggestions of other approaches worth considering.
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