Custom Fiberglassing

I need to make a custom fascia, for a 7 inch lcd, I've been looking around online. Found some personal pages but nothing that gave a good step by step on how to do custom fiberglassing. Anyone know of any online how-to's?

Have you seen this thread on mp3car forums?

No, but helpful, I'd already seen a bunch on how to do sub boxes and stuff like that. I see a lot of people on that forum do their own fiberglass. Honestly 90% of the fiberglassing I see guys on that forum doing aren't what I'd call... well... um... good? I've seen about 4 pics from those forums that look decent, and those are just people saying "hey look what I did". I honestly know the basics, but when it comes to making something out of the existing housing for an LCD, I only have one, I'd rather not screw it up. Most of the links on that particular post were dead being that it dates back to 2001. The link that worked I'd already seen. I guess, I'll resort to molding and casting my existing housing, and working from the copies....

how to do custom fiberglassing.

This procedure won't help you in your small project, but I read of a neat trick for larger applications.

The builder was making a custom enclosure of some kind in the back of an SUV to hold a bunch of subwoofers, and needed to shape it to fit around fender wells and the like.

He started by making a very rough shape out of chicken wire. Then he refined the shape by covering the chicken wire with aluminum foil, smoothing it until it was approximately the shape he wanted. Next he very carefully applied a coat of fiberglas resin to the aluminum foil and let it set up. That gave him something rigid enough to work with -- fill the low spots with putty, grind down the high spots, etc.. Then, apply the fiberglas cloth and do the finish work.

I thought it was an imaginative approach.

tanstaafl.

That is pretty cool, then again any project using chicken wire is sure to be hit! Unfortunately probably won't help, the more I think about it the more I think I'll probably use my molding/sculpting skills (hopefully it'll turn out better then my buttons did, then again I'll be painting it so it's not like tiny bubbles are going to matter).

Maybe you could give us a better idea of what it is you wish to do. You mentioned something about using the existing fascia? The basics are pretty straight forward.

Make a mockup of what you want out of putty are someother harding material.

Once you have a guide you cover it with a release agent and make a mold.

You use the mold, again with release agent to form your fiberglass part.

I'd say that for something like a fascia, that's probably a better way to go. Depending on just how much fiberglassing you need to do (i.e. just a small amount of trim, or a huge enclosure), you might want to look into a product called Solarez. It's basically premixed fibers and epoxy in a tube. You squirt it out into whatever shape or mold you need, and put it in the sun to cure for three minutes. It's intended for repairing dings, cracks, and holes on surfboards, and, having used it a couple times now, it's amazing stuff, and incredibly easy to use.

Well, I've seen people in other forums make things up by just using the fascia, molding putty and fiberglass. No molds, no casting, just sanding and what not. I wanted to avoid molding and casting (which I'm pretty good at, just a pain). But to give you an idea something along the lines of what this guy did.