It’s always gratifying to watch carbon fiber resin infusion. Everyone on the team can’t get enough of it. There’s something so rewarding about seeing epoxy resin flow through the tubes, across the infusion mesh, and into the carbon fiber beneath. It’s deeply satisfying to watch the leading resin front advance, all the trapped air bubbles getting sucked out first by a hard vacuum at around 30 inHg.
Here’s a short time-lapse video clip:
After 24 hours of room-temperature curing, the carbon fiber comes off the mold in spectacular beauty. The result is flawless. The twill weave has a deep three-dimensional look as light reflects off the fibers beneath the clear epoxy. Carbon fiber has this mesmerizing holographic effect that you can only really appreciate in person.
We first place the piece in a small oven for further curing over a few days at moderate temperature under infrared heat lamps:
The finished part looks astonishing straight from the mold. But most clear epoxies, including the one we are using, are not truly UV-stable and will yellow over time if we leave them bare. After full cure we trim the part and scuff the surface with heavy-duty scrub pads, then build up a few coats of a highly UV-resistant polyurethane topcoat. Finally we sand and buff it to a mirror gloss.
It took years to perfect the process. Let me know if you’d like a deep-dive tutorial on how we do it.