Nissan Patrol 4x4 (Africa)

Looking good mate!

Cedric - that looks ueber awesome. Nicely done...

Ain't fibreglass fun!

I have been itching permanently for the last week, hope you have managed to avoid that.

Well done Cedric! I really want to see how this is going to look..... it will be 2 years of sanding this coming Feb, so it will be spotless Im sure

hahaha... yeah good things take time ....

Peter, I cut the fibreglass into 300mm x 70mm long strips..... very very gently and a few smaller pieces to fit in between the spaces. I wore surgical gloves to avoid contact with the fibreglass directly. Luckily no itching, but I was super gentle when handling the strips. The only issue I had was that the resin I had may have been a little old and was not as runny as I wanted. So I battled my ass off to get the resin to soak into the glass.

Do you have any tips on how to get the resin a little more runny? I'm going to buy new batch of resin anyway. Any recommendations on brand?

I have decided to remove the plug from the mold to check what the surface finish looks like, and if i need to .... wait for it..... wait for it..... sandpaper the plug a little more .....

Many many years ago I used to get automotive paint and stuff from a autobody paint shop there in Monument road.... That was about 15 odd years ago.

Tony's Colours in booysens is good!

Cool thanks bud.

Not an expert myself, but I have been getting all my kit and a lot of useful advice from these guys:

http://www.amtcomposites.co.za/?gclid=C ... oCBUTw_wcB

Great stuff.... thanks Peter !!

Ok.... so my first mold attempt was a fail..... I almost knew in the back of my mind that this might happen , but told myself that if it did come out perfect first time then I'm enlisting myself as a genius..... hahaha.... well clearly not going to be enlisting now am i....

In a nutshell, the finish of the mold came out beautiful. however I only made it a 2 part mold and not a 3 part. What this did was make it extremely difficult to get the plug out without damaging the fibreglass. Once i cracked the mold I then realized that even getting the plug out was not going to be a fun task, to which it then broke, causing me to make use of lots of not often used words that start with an F and end similar to a "que" and no not Fortescue either....

So deciding that the plaster cast plug was far to difficult to work with and massively time consuming to mold into the curvy shape that I want, so I went to a foam shop and purchased a block of foam... not cheap, considering half of it was going to be cut off and turfed out due to the curvy GU dash. But I plodded on and after much sanding and measuring and checking, I have a beautiful foam plug. I thought I had a photo of it on my phone, but I guess I didn't take one ( I'll rectify that tonight when I get home ).

This plug is absolutely fantastic, When you sand the foam, the texture comes out like suede leather. I would almost like to just use the foam plug as the console. Yeah it would work beautifully but sun UV and foam are not good friends, so I will have to either upholster that foam plug or continue making a proper mold for this to be able to make a few replicas. I don't think anyone, well anyone sane, will want to go through this process, so I would like to make a mold to be able to save the sanity of the sane people out there....hahaha.

Now, foam and fibre glass resin are not exactly compatible materials, so I still need to body putty up the foam plug and sand it down to the desired finish. and then I will be making a 3 part mold. This is going to be beautiful when its finished and upholstered.