Dan Stout

Hey everyone! I am Dan Stout. I am currently working as a Quality Engineer (QE) at a composite manufacturing company. I have worked in composites for about 9 years and have been in quality for about 10 years (~8 years as a QE). Despite working around composites for many years, I never attempted building my own parts until about a year ago. When I first started in composites I was a technician, but instead of building parts I was truing carbon fiber bicycle wheels (thus no hands on molding, etc. experience). After truing wheels, I moved into a quality inspector role. Eventually I went back to school and got an engineering degree, I have worked as a QE ever since! Looking back, I wish I had gotten hands on experience actually manufacturing composite parts. I have been around lots of cool processes: roll wrapping, filament winding, bladder molding, triaxial braiding, RTM, VARTM, hand layup, etc. If only I had started back when I first got into composite, imagine what I could be building now! But alas, I am doing it now. I wonder what I will be able to build in my garage 10 years from now... My first time getting my hands dirty in composite was at a community college night course taught by the legendary composite guru @John Kimball!! This is where my passion to hand make my own parts began. I highly recommend the class! Enough rambling for now... I'm excited to meet everyone and bounce ideas off of each other as I work to improve my skills!

Nice work Anthony! I am incredibly impressed with your mold polishing. Looks like a mirror finish. I can only image how long that took.

Ok. I thought I did do a thorough cleaning, but it was just with a cloth and IPA and Acetone. I had no idea I would need a stiff brush to properly clean it. I was assuming you were going to ask what kind of blast media I used. I have no idea. lol. I will have to look into that. This was my first time using any kind of grit blasting system. It quickly removed any shininess and made the surface look dull, but it didn't do much more than that. If I held it over a specific spot, I expected it to start breaking into the fibers like you said, but nothing happened.

Hello composites gurus! I am always looking for ways to cut time and manual labor in my garage composite projects. Most of the parts that I build are wet layup in a mold, then hand sanded and trimmed before applying a final coat of epoxy resin. Recently I had access to a sandblaster and used this to rough up my molded parts. When I applied the top coat of resin, it did not evenly coat the part, but instead beaded up. Should sandblasting be sufficient for bond prepping composites, or for applying a layer of resin like I do? I wish I had taken pictures of the sandblasted parts and the resin beading up, but I didn't.

This is truly incredible John! The final product is quite stylish as well! You have me thinking now about how to implement an oven in my home work shop. I have been thinking about trying to figure something out for quite some time now. I want one that is larger though, perhaps the size of a typical kitchen oven.