Just wanted to share my latest project with everyone.
I built a custom fiberglass speaker box to fit snug between the rear strut towers. It took me about 3 weeks of working on it here and there, it is my first fiberglass speaker box, and my biggest fiberglass project to date. I’d say I have about $50 in materials in the box including all the fiberglass resin’s, matting, paint and everything else.
I built this for my girls car (93 Integra) that I will be working on most of the winter. The box is painted 2003 Lexus IS300 Phantom gray, that is the color I am going with on the entire car. Let me know what you think… Thanks
That looks incredible! Especially for the first time. You did an excellent job on the body work.
BTW, how did you get the materials so cheap? I just got done with a fiberglass project about that size and I’m in it for about $320 in materials. What really sucks is I only charged the guy $500 for the job and then gave him a $50 discount when the vinyl die came up with the masking tape on the back of the seats.
Check page 4 and page 8 of my website where I have pictures of the build process for two different fiberglass installs. Here’s the link: http://www.sounddomain.com/memberpage/304268
Thanks, I appreciate it. I hope to do another box for my show car next, hopefully I will have carbon fiber down enough by then to try my first carbon fiber box, I already have the CF matting and everything.
I used a 50/50 sweat shirt material for the cloth, and I bought most of my fiberglass materials at Wal-Mart. The most of the cost was for the 3 1/2 cans of polyester resin I had to buy (around $7-8 a can). I had alot of the fillers and stuff already, and I had all the reducers and hardeners for the paint already, because I do a decent amount of body work.
What materials are you using? Where are you getting them? $320 for materials… ouch!
You can always build the box of fiberglass then lay CF over it for the final layer if you want the look. I have found CF easier to work with than fiberglass (CF cloth and resin, not prepreg), it is easier to get the cloth to bend around corners and such.
I’m guessing you mean you bought 3.5 quarts? How did you do that with so little resin? I used just under 2 gallons on that Porshe install.
I had a feeling. That body work looked too good for a newbie.
I’d have to check my list of materials. But the resin (bought at www.fiberlay.com) gets expensive after shipping. I was very annoyed at the cost of the Duraglass. Where I used to live, I could buy a gallon for $22 a gallon. At fiberlay it was $42.37. Unfortunately the cheaper shop wouldn’t ship it as it is hazardous materials. I should also mention that I did make a mistake on one piece that I had to fix. So there were some materials used to fix that.
Anyway if you want a good, inexpensive place to buy fiberglass materials from, check out www.uscomposites.com. I would have bought from them if I could have gotten the materials faster. But from Florida to Washington it would have taken over a week in shipping and you can’t ship fiberglass materials via air.
That’s what I was thinking. I just haven’t had much time to actually play with the material since I got it too much, I made one small piece and used up my resin, I need to order more. What kind of resin are you using?
Yeah, why haven’t you come by yet? If you hurry you can see that install before I give it back to the customer. Plus we have other fun stuff to check out.
I’ve never used carbon fiber before, mainly because of the cost and it looks really tough to use. But from what I understand, you are supposed to use epoxy resins on it. The US Composites link I provided mentions this in their epoxy resin section: “Our 635 Resin System is a high quality resin which is popular for lamination with fiberglass, carbon fiber, kevlar or any type of reinforcement.” BTW, they have a lot of different types/patterns of carbon fiber fabrics.
I used it with Formula SAE, was a few years ago. I think the resin was from West Systems? We were sponsored by a composites company, but I don’t remember who. Wicks Aircraft Supply has lots of composites stuff. The CF cloth we used was a bi-directional weave, the weave is so much larger than fiberflass cloth that after you soak it in resin and lay it over whatever you are molding to, you can work it and get the strands of the weave to move relative to each other to work out wrinkles and lumps. Of course I am probably not explaining this very well.
