Shrinking fiberglass?

C

Chuck S

I'm posting for a coworker that has a Chevrolet Monza highly customized daily driver. He order a complete fiberglass front-end and has fiberglass the rear of the car. He change the fiberglass front-end and said he used fiberglass matting and some bondo on the fiberglass. He finished it couple of years ago and the car looks great. The paint job look perfect. But over time his perfect paint job started to change on him. Said that he can see where he fill the turn signals holes with fiberglass, anywhere he joined pieces of fiberglass he can see the line where they were joined together and some of his very straight and flawless panels have become a little wavy. He plans on sanding and blocking the whole car in about a year and repaint it. His question is will 3 years be long enough for everything to cure or dry or is this going to be a never ending problem? I thing he used PPG products.Any ideas what is going on.
Thanks Chuck
 
Let me tell you everything I know about fiber glass:

About six years ago a shop invited me by to see a custom truck with a new fiberglass body he built for a customer.
When I got there is the most perfect thing you ever laid your eyes on and the bill was somewhere in the 150,000 range to the customer.
A company had started making old pickup fiberglass bodies that was used.
He proudly took a ball bearing and said every gap on this truck is exactly the same and he showed me the bearing test.
What a job.
Six months later he called me and said remember the gaps? Everyone is bigger now and the ball bearing will not work anywhere and some gaps are as much as 1/8 inch from one point to the other.

My question was, did the raw glass set in the sun for 7 days before you started on it, no.
This is a must with any new glass panel, i don't care if it sat in a warehouse for 10 years, it is not cured.

To answer your question, if he drove it for 3 years, it should be cured but paint and material on the glass will delay the cure also.
 
It seems polyester resin has become easy to whore out. I don't get it because there's only so much you can do to resin before it won't work as resin anymore...however, if you use vinylester resin and alot of curing techniques, you can still have usable fiberglass suitable for high quality work...the high heat cure is necessary, however. In your buddies case, that tidbit of information won't help...I would strip it and throw it out in the sun under black plastic for a week, then redo...don't know any other way, and it probably won't interest him because of the enormity of the job.
 
9 out of 10 times the part you buy was made after you ordered it. it cured just long enough to get out of the mold. especially larger parts that take up space. cooking it in the sun is the only way to finish cure it that i know of. BUT if it is a green part it needs to cure some inside before you put it outside. some green parts will distort outside.
flynams is right. polyester parts can be of really piss poor quality. cheap . vinylester is up the scale from polyester , often call mold resin or tooling gel.
 
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