Gonna call this update "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly".
I knew this wasn't gonna be easy. And I knew I was using some new "tech". It actually would have worked out fine, had I known one detail.
Let's start with the good.
The headlight buckets are money. Perfect.
When I paint them, you'll see how realistic they'll be - and man they are bright!
The mold for the buck came out nice:
The foam was interesting. I set it up just like the videos with mold release liberally applied, and a sheet of plexiglass with three holes on top. As I poured it, I really wondered if I had enough. Oh boy. Yeah, I had enough. It rose up slowly at first, then it went nuts. It came rushing out of the escape holes at the top at a rapid rate, covering the entire sheet of plexiglass, and my hands that were holding it down. Kids - don't be like Johnny - wear gloves!! That stuff is HOT when it's expanding. Also it sticks to you like glue. Nothing like ripping off polyurethane foam and hair. Good times.
After a couple of hours I removed the excess foam off the glass.
Mistake one was obvious. Three holes was not enough. Six would have been better. The foam pushed the glass off the mold despite my best efforts. For the rear half of the car, I'll use six. And maybe just stick some weights or something on the glass to hold it down.
The second mistake wasn't so obvious. I started trying to remove the molds, and they were budging at all. After some time, I just decided, screw it, and started tearing the 3d printed molds off in pieces. As soon as I peeled off the top layer, I saw the issue. There was foam INSIDE the friggin' molds! Apparently this stuff will find it's way though the tiniest holes and cracks - and apparently my molds were more porous than I thought.
Undaunted, I kept tearing it off, and then I saw the horrors. The foam was getting mutilated in a number of spots from all of this, and there were some major voids in the front of the car. (this may have been because of how the foam lifted the glass up, not sure). I got half of the molds off, and it looked pretty awful, and useless.
I tore the other front piece off, and it wasn't nearly as bad on that side, but overall, this was really bad. Now, I could start over, and THIS time coat the mold with a liberal coat of Flex Seal (definitely doing that for the rear half!!!!). Or, see if there was something I could do to salvage this. I had a tub of wood putty handy, because I was going to use that anyway for smoothing the thing out. Now I'd have to use a lot of it, to reconstruct a lot of really mangled areas. Was it doable? Maybe. Definitely the front would have to be done in layers and over several days, to build it up. The rest I figured I could do without too much trouble. Back in my muscle car days, I was a Bondo Magician, so this was no biggie
I did the first mudding Saturday, mostly just to get a foundation and the shape back. I didn't even bother taking off the last mold piece yet, as it was a real pain, and figured "lemme see if I can even fix this" first.
I let it dry overnight. After some drag racing with my team (I'll make another post in my Nova thread on that), I came home and had the choice to cut the grass, or start sanding. A lot of the front parts where I filled in huge voids were still squishy, so I focused on the top. I got it sanded using 220 to get the shape and lines, the shape looked good, and so I again mudded it up for round 2 (I expect about five or six, maybe more rounds of doing this overall).
Tonight I will sand all this down, and see about filling in the rest of the bad areas around the lower grill/spoiler. Mostly after that, the mudding should be filling little pock marks and such, which is painstaking, but easy. Then shaping the whole lower grill/spoiler area, and focusing on that.
Yeah, it's ugly right now, but I do see the light at the end of the tunnel. And I have time - as I wait for the rear molds to print. Two are done, two more (each takes a day). I won't make the same silly mistake with that. Either way I was going to have to mud this thing up, I just wasn't expecting to have to reconstruct busted up areas. Then again, I had to do that with my Dragonoid mold as well - that was the reason I decided against using water putty this time - that and the thing would weigh a ton and take a year to cure/dry.
Once I have this thing baby smooth, I'm coating it with some 30 minute epoxy, probably two thick layers. Then I'll primer it, and sand with 1000 paper, and see any imperfections, which I fix, then re-epoxy one last coat.
My other fear was how well this would hold up under heat/pressure. Well, with this much wood putty and epoxy, it was probably ok. The foam itself is incredibly strong. I put my heat gun on high and blasted it just to see if it would hold up. Even with the foam smoking, it didn't collapse, so I think it's fine. Just for good measure though, I won't put the thing into the vacuum former until the lexan is mostly heated and ready.
It's coming along, just have to remind myself to be patient!
But it was enough to slightly crush spray foam we used to fill gaps around molds.
