Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Making Makey Part 4: Pulling Parts”.
Welcome back to the next episode of the stinky part of the series right now we’re getting ready to lay up some of the parts we’ve got molds ready to actually start building fiberglass pieces inside. As you can see, this one here has already been prepped and coated with the red gel coat. That’S going to become the surface finish of the actual robot, when it’s done so just like with the molds we’re going to be starting with gel coat and then laying up fiberglass on top of it. Unlike the molds, we’re basically doing this inside out so with the molds you started by building the inside of the mold and then stacking up material towards the outside, which is the fiberglass that you see on the outside there with the finished part you’re starting by putting Down the gel coat, which will become the outside of the part and then building up the fiberglass layers on the inside for strength. So we’ll start with something fairly simple.
This mold here is for the foot. It’S going to be a single piece, so we’ll start by mixing up our fiberglass resin and then it’s just a question of brushing everything down same as we did when we were building a mold. So when we’re talking about some of the bigger, more complex parts, where there’s no one good direction to be able to pull it in order to get out of the mold without breaking it, you have to make the molds in multiple parts. So when that happens, sometimes it’s a nice big, open piece and you can reach inside and you can do all the layup while the mold is completely put together in this case, because you’ve got this tiny little mold to work with it’s going to be really difficult To have to reach through this hole to do all of the layup work, so instead, what i’m going to do is i’m going to actually do most of the layup on each of the three parts of the mold while it’s still laid open and then once the Layup is done, i’m going to go ahead and bolt the mold closed and actually just go. Do the layup on the seams all right! So now we’ll take our sections of the mold that are separate and we’re going to stick them together and bolt the flanges using wing nuts.
So i can do this all with my fingers, so i’m using a three-quarter inch bolt because that’s the shortest i can buy in this diameter. Don’T really necessarily need the diameter to be as big as it is, but i want something that’s going to be easy to handle with gloved fingers, so i’m using a quarter inch diameter bolt and for those of you in the metric system, a quarter inch. That’S about that much so we’ve got the mold bolted together. The next thing we’re going to do is take a look and see if we’ve got everything covered on the inside as i’m looking at it there’s a lot of visible gray, gel coat, which means there’s portions that weren’t covered with red before we started the layup. So i’ll end up going back through with a batch of gel coat and just brush on over the seams cover up all the gaps. Make sure that the finished part that comes out is completely red and then once that’s had a chance to firm up a tiny bit we’ll go back over and cover all of the seams with more fiberglass and just strengthen up all those edges where the mold comes Apart bond all the parts together and then we wait in order to do the seams since i’m kind of working blind.
What i’m going to do is i’m going to pre-saturate the fiberglass mat before it goes in so i’ve laid down some wax paper. I’M going to cut myself a handy strip of fiberglass, i’m just gon na lay it into the resin, make sure it’s all soaked all the way through now. We know at least this part’s saturated it just becomes a question of laying it into the seam. So problem is nice square shape, so it needs to slide out now we have a foot, that’s the part where we find out. If i’m a complete idiot, hey, not complete.
Now we need a time lapse, so uh. At this point, we’ve got the first handful of parts out of the mold we’ve just about got all the molds made. Now we’ve got a lot more fiberglass layup to do in the next couple of days and then we’re gon na get the person. That’S gon na wear this thing come up here and strap some parts onto them.
So we’ll see you next time you .