I have been mostly a metal airplane builder most of my life, although I did start out with tube-and-fabric. My fiberglass experience has been tips, fairings, and cowlings of those metal airplanes, and I have always envied the folks who can create an entire airplane out of the stuff. I’m more of a “fiberglass basher” when it comes right down to it. I do as well as most metal builders, but it takes me much more effort to get there than the true artists of the trade. I make more of a mess and undoubtedly waste more material in getting the job done.
But here are just a couple of tips for those who find themselves a stranger in a strange land.
First, if you use a pump system for your resin and hardener, do yourself a favor and go buy a flat plastic bin to keep them in. When the pumps drip, the mess will be contained, and you won’t have random spots of resin messing up the shop. You can even carry the bin to wherever you want to work and not have to deal with messy cans. Resins tend to find their way everywhere!
Second: Never throw away a broken tool—you might find a good use for it! This particular tool was an old “chip chaser,” used to insert between two sheets of aluminum to pull out burrs and chips after you have drilled holes (when you can’t separate the sheets for some reason). It is a very slim blade with a hook on the end. But if the hook breaks off, you can grind the end square—and you now have a tool for popping fiberglass layups off your metal parts (which you hopefully covered in packing tape and a little wax or other mold release material). The chip chaser is very thin steel, robust, flexible, and easy to get between the layup and the skin.
Good suggestions, Paul. Composites are great stuff, but can be very messy to work with. EAA has a good primer course on working with epoxies for use in components on metal planes as well as for an entire scratch-built aircraft. One thing that metal builders don’t recognize is that the majority of composite builders are assembling a kit of pre-formed parts similar in concept to the old plastic models we all put together as kids. The theory is that kits are faster and easier to build and composites offer aerodynamic shapes not possible with metal – thus your use to streamline various parts of your metal planes.
While the concept of a kit sounds like it would be a faster build, there some nuances to the process that can make or break the project. Screw up the mating of wing or fuselage pieces and you may be ordering some very expensive replacement parts. The original EAA composite course actually involved assembly of components from a Lancair kit. It was great for someone seriously thinking about building a composite kit plane. The course has evolved more into what you would want for making fairings and similar components for your metal plane. Too bad they don’t still offer both versions.