Fiberglass made easy

BGizzlePatrick · 05-17-2005, 11:26 AM

I have been looking online for quiet a while to find an easy how to guide with lots of pictures on how to do fiberglass molding and stuff.
First off i want every1 to know that this is the very very first time im doing this and I by no means say that everything i do is the only and/or best way to do it. If you see this post and notice something that i could have done any better please let us all know so we can all learn from it :-)

Today i will show how i want to make two of these rockford tweeters blend in into my interior:
-PICTURE-

This is the old plastic piece where i had the tweeter mounted all this time. Its those plastic pieces on each door by the sideview mirrors:
-PICTURE-

First thing i did i digged out an old tube of contact adhesive and glued the empty tweeter housing onto the plastic piece and let it dry for a feew minutes to make sure the housing will stay where i want it:
-PICTURE 1-
-PICTURE 2-
-PICTURE 3-

BGizzlePatrick · 05-17-2005, 11:27 AM

While i let the adhesive settle I went to cut the fleece. Some people use real fiberglass mats but i found that fleece might work just as fine and is much much cheaper by the yard in walmart. In this case I bought me a whole bunch of regular blue fleece for about 6bucks a yard but any collor of fleece will do fine but i just love blue lol:
-PICTURE-

I just layed the fleece down and put my piece on it and cut a good size of the fleece off. Notice i cut to where i have very big piece of fleece just to make sure it will stretch since it will adjust to the form of the tweeter housing. Just keep in mind to give yourself enough fleece to work with. You can always cut the excess off later on:
-PICTURE-
-PICTURE 2-

After this i just took the adhesive again and put it on the edges of the tweeter housing so the fleece will stay on the same spot while i will stretch and pull it over the whole piece. I used the contact adhesive because it just works wonderfully with the fleece. Since its thick and sticky you can put it on and stretch the fleece over it and it stays right away without having to hold the fleece in place while waiting for the adhesive to settle. Anyways, i put adhesive on the inner tweeter trim and on the bottom edges of the whole piece:
-PICTURE-
-PICTURE 2-

Just pull the fleece all the way down to the edges and make sure it looks nice and even:
-PICTURE-

After you gave it a minute or two you can go ahead and start to trim off the excess fleece arround the edges to make it look nice:
-PICTURE-

At the same time i also cut out the hole for the tweeter itself:
-PICTURE-

Now the real fun begins! Go to HomeDepot or WalMart and pick up one can of Bondo Fiberglass Resin such as this one:
-PICTURE-

This stuff is great! You just pour the resin into a container where u can mix it, drop a feew drops of the hardener that came with it into it. In this case i just poured it onto a paper plate since im just taking the piece and kinda "dunk" it into the resin:
-PICTURE-

BGizzlePatrick · 05-17-2005, 11:27 AM

The soaked piece will look like this:
-PICTURE-
-PICTURE 2-

Depending on how much hardener you put into the mixture it will take a couple of minutes to couple of hours for the resin to dry and harden. I just left it out over night. The next day you can go get some Bondo Body Filler such as this one:
-PICTURE-

You can get this at HomeDepot and WalMart as well. Now, I have used this stuff first but found its kinda hard to work with because it get very "chunky" and uneven once it dries and u still try to put it on. So I stopped using this one and started using just the regular Fine Bodyfiller from Bondo i found it work sooo much easier.
-PICTURE-
I used that pink plastic spreader to put the bodyfiller on first but found its alot easier and more fun if you get yourself some latex gloves and just use your hands to put it on.

This is the piece after i got the first coat of filler on it and let it dry for some time:
-PICTURE-

I wanted to see what it will look like so i took the tweeter and held it in:
-PICTURE-
Note, I bought me a litle Dremel tool and it made everything soooo much easier. After the filler was completely dried i took the dremel and cut out all the plastic inside the piece to get the tweeter to go in.

This is the piece after i sanded the body filler down for the first time. Since the Fiberglass enforced body filler is soo hard i ended up using the dremel to get it to this point:
-PICTURE-
-PICTURE 2-

Since this was very very close the the form i wanted i just needed to even everything out and get it to look nice. So what i did is i took some crylon plastic paint primer and sprayed it on so that when i put another layer of body filler on it and sand it down i can tell when to i have sanded enough lol. Thats just me though i just thought that makes easier for me. This is what it looked like after the second sanding with 100, 120, and 220 grid sandpaper:
-PICTURE-
-PICTURE 2-

BGizzlePatrick · 05-17-2005, 11:28 AM

This already looked really really good to me so i went ahead and got me more crylon primer and blue paint and clear coat from walmart and put 1 coat of primer 3 coats of paint and 4 coats of clear coat on it:
-PICTURE-
-PICTURE 2-

Here is a comparison of the piece that i started working on compared to the finished product:
-PICTURE-

After looking at the final piece for a while i decided to use a flushmount trim that came with the tweeter:
-PICTURE-

And this is what it looks like with the tweeter in it:
-PICTURE-
-PICTURE 2-

Eversince i got those pictures i have still been working on the pieces and have yet to install them into the car lol.
I went back to HomeDepot and bought me some 320 and 400grid sandpaper and took all of the color back off and wet sanded it.
Wet sanding works by getting a container full of water and sand your piece while wet lol its that easy and make for such a better finish. I also picked up some other clear coat paint from HomeDepot that works much much better than that stuff from walmart. I will post the name and pictures once i get to it.

I might still add to this post as i go along my projects of fiberglass working. These small projects im working on right now are just practice to get good at it so i can do a good fiberglass finish for my entire trunk in a couple of weeks.

I hope this will help you guys! And happy fiberglass molding :-)

BGizzlePatrick · 10-07-2005, 06:50 AM

Due to so much feedback and questions I have opened a topic in the newbie forum for you guys to ask any questions or to add any comment and/or suggestions in so please feel free to drop a note or two:
http://www.dsmtuner.com/forums/showt...48#post1675048