Been a while since last posting, mainly because not much Monster progress in the intervening period, SWMBO elevated loads of house maintenance type jobs because her college friend was visiting from Australia – re-laying patio tiles frost damaged in 2017, making the garden fountain work etc., etc.
Today was spent modifying the patterns to get rid of sharp corners and where possible putting them on a polypropylene base rather than a wooden or estate agent board base. I started with the air scoop patterns and took them off their bases, I tried them in their respective locations and they would not fit? WTF? Obviously my previous efforts to have non parallel sides to the patterns (so I could get away with non split moulds) involved a thin triangular fillet of filler towards the base. Also, the frame has now been powder coated and this has decreased the available space by nearly a millimetre. Bloody glad I did just try then out as I would have looked a proper clown if I had carried on without doing so. After all the work that had gone into them to get them polished it nearly broke my heart to take the angle grinder to them with an abrasive flap wheel, still needs must. The instrument nacelle had the same treatment.
I spent about 2 hours rubbing them down and was about to primer resin coat them when I felt a few drops of rain. I moved on to making the mould dividers for the headlamp shell and the tool tray. The technique when you have established where the mould is to be split is to cut a cardboard template as close to a fit with the cross section of the split in the mould. Then using small strips of masking tape you adjust the profile until it is a reasonably good fit, less than 1mm gap. Then transfer the resulting profile onto 3mm polypropylene sheet and cut it out with a jigsaw. The hard part is then filing the polypropylene (which does not file readily) to a good fit. Any gaps remaining between the polypropylene barrier and the pattern can be filled with wax and trimmed with a wooden lolly stick.
