Quote:
Originally Posted by hal0n
it wouldnt work well its too flexible of a material to hold the shape for a production part. a metal mold would be ideal, but expensive.
Furthermore, resin transfer molding (hand lay up) results in relatively heavy and weak parts. The resin is the heavy and weak part of the composite. So you want to minimize the amount of resin in the composite. Resin transfer results in really low fiber % by volume and by weight. You really want to use prepreg or you have to come up with a method to extract as much resin as possible. ideally you want to get down to like 20% resin by volume. even with vacuum bagging you can't really get below 50% by volume.
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First off, fiberglass can and is very frequently used to make molds. You would just need to make sure the backup structure for the mold was stiff enough to keep everything true and the fiberglass would be more than strong enough to hold the contours.
Secondly, RTM is not the same thing as hand layup and can, when done properly, yield very good ratios. Maybe not as good as prepreg, but pretty good.
On top of that, these parts are totally cosmetic. A hand layup is going to add such a minimal amount of weight (especially since to look good it's going to need a heavy clear coat anyway) that it's a perfectly acceptable technique.
