Today is the day for infusing. Finished prepping the form and materials yesterday. Even got the first layer down.
Its a veil fabric that prevents print thru from the other reinforcements when under vacuum pressure. It adds no weight and is invisible when wet out. They make it from glass, kevlar or carbon. I'm using kevlar, because its already a yellow tint and I had some from another project. The choice of material is not critical when making opaque, colored composite.
The method by which Gordon's, Bearpaw, Excel, etc. make their glass, is called pultrusion. Picture a huge rack with hundreds of fiber spools, all feeding into a tiny 2"X.050" die, then all those aligned threads getting pulled thru a resin bath, into a heated chamber and coming out the other end cured and close to its final dimension, excluding length.
Unfortunately this cannot be done at home. At least not by me! Trying to get the same results doing a wet lay up by hand is very difficult, ask anybody who has tried how much work it is and how many failures they have had.
One of the most difficult objectives, thats critical, is a good exterior side surface finish. It's possible to put down a color gel coat, but its hard to control the thickness with epoxy. It's not self leveling like paint and a thick epoxy rind on a flexible composite is not optimum.
So the veil, which becomes invisible when wet out, provides the correct rind thickness, reinforces it and prevents the fibers behind it from showing thru. It's not possible to use effectively though, unless you are doing a vacuum infusion. It needs to be held down flat and in place. Trying to wet out, by hand, reinforcement thats on top, will just cause it to bunch up. I've been going on and on about the stuff because to me its a critical of a component as the resin and the glass fiber
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