Resin Infusion Composites Experiment

Composites are amazing materials. If you've no idea what they are, a composite material is basically some kind of woven material or fabric that is moulded into a shape while soaked in a liquid resin. The resin then hardens and you have a permanent form. Carbon fiber is a composite where the laminate (the fabric bit) is woven strands of carbon. Glass fiber is a composite. You can make composites from all sorts of stuff: flax, for example, or kevlar.

Composites are great because you can mould them to an astonishing array of shapes, from flat sheets to the aerodynamic bodywork on an F1 car. They also have a phenomenal strength to weight ratio which is why they are popular for applications like motor racing or aviation.

Unsurprisingly then, being able to make my own composite parts appeals to me for a variety of reasons. If I can get this right I can make some amazing and unique parts for my airstream, and I can use the skills I've learned down the road for making other stuff like motorcycle or car parts.

This isn't as wacky as it might sound. My Airstream came from the factory with many composite parts. The bath tub is composite, so were the interior end caps. It seems only right to update the interior taking advantage of modern composite materials so that's my plan: to do as much of the interior as possible with home made composites. Which means I have to learn how to do it.

After getting my hands dirty with the most primitive method — a simple wet layup using a paint brush and some finger prodding — I concluded that this wasn't going to produce the quality I wanted. So after fairly extensive research in both books and on YouTube I decided that a process called resin infusion would be best. It was (sort of) affordable to buy the hardware, and it didn't seem beyond my capacity to learn, so off I went to Easy Composites to buy some stuff and give it a go.

The process works by creating a vacuum that draws the resin across the part while also ensuring the laminate material is sucked into exact conformance with the mould. My first crack at it was a success, but there's going to be a hard road ahead of me to master this process and the necessary mould-making skills. Fortunately Easy Composites have amazing tutorials. They also have incredible customer service by the way. Ten out of ten would recommend.