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CF Nosecone Skinning Project

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New project started a week ago. Biggest pain so far was removing the chrome trim. I can't believe they made it so difficult to remove. But once that was off, I was able to get to the fun parts :)

Here's a picture of the nosecone in a vacuum bag with the CF. Vacuuming the part makes it so that the CF is straight and wraps around the part really well and tightly.

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Next, I'll be adding epoxy layers. My hope is that I can take it to the paint shop in a week or so.
 
Assume you had to prep the nosecone surface. Is the CF epoxied to the nosecone?

To prep the nosecone, I had to sand the nosecone down a little bit, then apply some epoxy and let that dry to a tack. Once it's at a tack, you can lay down the carbon fiber. This allows the carbon fiber to stick to the nosecone and wrap around the edges. It's then put into the vacuum bag so that the carbon wraps tightly around while the epoxy mostly completely cures. It takes about 12 hours for this to happen (depends on the epoxy you use). Because I chose to vacuum bag the part, I had to build a structure for the nosecone to sit on so that the pressure of the vacuum didn't bend/deform the nosecone:

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It's slow going now, I've gotten a bit busy, so I haven't been able to add as many epoxy layers as I wanted. It's a time consuming process (i.e., let the epoxy dry for 8-12 hours, add more epoxy, sand down the epoxy evenly). There's a couple imperfections I'm not happy about, but I think i can live with them. We'll see :)

If all goes well, this weekend I'll have a pretty good idea of how it will look.