Hezz

I was mixing some epoxy for another project and I thought that I would try to make some quick gravity layups from the cement molds of my cycling shoes. I worked really fast because I had already mixed up the epoxy so the work was a little bit sloppy. I was not convinced that this epoxy would work. It is a very slow setting kind of general purpose epoxy that takes 24 hours to fully cure.

But it has also allowed me more time to kind of message these things into shape. I first started by cutting a ziplock bag so I had a single layer of plastic. I was out of plastic food wrap so I used this. I then layed the plastic sheet on the mold and sprayed it with PAM as a release agent.

Then I poured some of the resin in the mold and quickly cut out three layers of fiberglass cloth to shape. Using a plastic knife I worked the resin into the three layers of fiberglass cloth and tried to get as much of the resin out of the mold as I could. I got one of the plate layups somewhat misaligned but I will be able to trim it later.

In retrospect I could have taken more time since the epoxy was still viscous after 1 hour. I ended up with things looking like this.

After curing overnight ( about 9 hours) the plates were firm enough to be removed from the mold and the plastic peeled right off. The plates were still soft enough to trim them with a pair of good strong scissors. I then taped them to the shoes in hopes that they will retain the proper curve as they continue to harden. Hopefully they will get hard enough to be useful.