gbrettin

Moving onto phase 2. I was able to pop a perfect fiberglass mold of the front bezel. NO AIR POCKETS! hah. I think I have the hang of fiberglass now. I'll do vacuum bagged cubby mounts going in the future but I wanted to work on this doing hand layups.

90% of the face was cut out of the original face. I left a corner at the top left and right of the original face and then a small strip at the bottom so I can lay the bezel against that with out it moving around. I used a finger sander to carve out the back side so that I could lay my Tinker Electronics display flush against the bezel and so that side can support the unit.

Lightweight bondo was used in the small areas around the border. As mentioned earlier, I wanted to fix the bottom of the mount so that there are very tight gaps between the oem plastic and the cubby. Now here's were it got tricky... My car is 30min from my house. I used marglass to build up the bottom to the gap I marked out on the face, ranging from 1/16 to 1/8. Excess fiberglass was cut from the bottom of the mount with a razorblade while the fiberglass was soft. I'd say about 6-8min after initially mixing it up. Then I used 80grit to lightly shape at the 11 - 12min mark. Then I loaded up the orbital sander, sand paper, and cubby into the car and headed down to the shop to test fit. Now this doesn't happen often, but I applied the correct amount of fiberglass or at least knocked it down to the right spots the first time.

For being the first mount that came out of the mold, I'm extremally happy with the cubby mount. It fits exactly the way I want. Originally I was going to toss this one in the garbage because of the original layup wasn't great due to the air pockets and the feet did not form how I wanted. This particular part is imperfectly perfect to me. I'm going to clean up a few areas and bond some mounting brackets, but this thing is nearly ready for primer/paint.