Body
The fiberglass body I will make by first making a plug, taking a mold from that plug and casting the body from that mold.
So the plug, I investigated a couple of options for this, the first, quickest and easiest was to get a big bit of foam CNC cut but the local CNC cutting shop said about $12,000 to $15,000 NZD, no thank you.
I then tried to find how other people have done this and found an interesting series of you tube videos "Bailey Blade" where the guy sliced up his drawing, printed it out onto MDF, cut and attached these together with foam in-between, then shaped it with elbow grease and time.
However I had a better idea (well we'll see anyway) of 3D printing the parts, this required the design to be given a depth and then sliced up into sections that will fit the print envelope. Then attach these together on a simple frame work (to keep it all true), so how much would that cost? (how much did that cost as this is what I ran with)
$499 USD printer from solidoodle, $35 NZD per 1Kg spool of plastic and calculating the m2 I would get from the average filament density (1.04 g/cm3) for that 1Kg (0.26m2) I will need 64Kg's to print out the 16m2 body at 2mm depth. this comes in at $2250 NZD which is cheap enough.
However once I got printing it turns out I needed 5mm depth as 2mm distorts too easily, but fortunately because it only prints 20% of the inside (it uses a honeycomb mesh to keep the strength) it still ends up being 0.26m2 per 1Kg spool so back on track.
Here's some pics, it takes ages to slice these things up and prepare them for printing but it's sitting down on the couch stuff so I don't mind:
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Originally Posted by nzeder
via the Z Club - so I will arrange a visit to see his work in the flesh soon. Just an outstanding idea to use a 3D printer to help make the base for the Fibre Glass mould.
