Honda50.com

Its always nice when you can buy a part and simply remake, duplicate, or make slight changes with little effort. The Ducati monsteresk like tail cowl for the ZB50 is a commonly used piece in many people custom monkey R builds and something I always thought would look nice in 2 by 2 twill weave carbon fiber. Today i started making a mold of it so i can remake it in carbon. The great thing about working with this piece is i didn’t have to change a thing about it to make it work as a composite project. The shape of the tail cowl will release from a two piece mold perfectly with out any issues.

So today I re polished the cowl, then applied a few coats of mold release wax, then PVA’ed the objects. Ive covered all the prep before in other posts so if you don’t know what I was just talking about I suggest looking back at previous posts on the topic. For the mold design its a basic two sided mold with a splitter plate down the middle. The first half came out great. I used some filler in the resin around the splitter and that made for a perfect 90 degree edge. Other then that I started like I normally do with my molds with a few layers of light weight fiber glass then another two with the heavy weight stuff. I also used the fast hardener and actually did the complete layup in the sun. This worked out well as i had a very limited amount of time for the project and things really setup fast.

With both sides of the mold complete the layup was rather easy. I ended up using a single sheet of Carbon for the initial layer, then added 2 more in carbon, one in fiber glass and finished with a final layer of carbon. The tail cowl is 4 layers total and is plenty strong. These next two pics show the cowl fresh out of the mold untrimmed and unfinished.

After some quick trim and cleanup work this is how it looks. I still need to UV clear the piece and do some more polish work.

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