COMPOSIT 101,202 AND ADVANCE Newsletter.

-Using a shop-vac for vacuum bagging?.

In this issue of the Composite 101, 202 and Advance Newsletter:

This newsletter question is a classic sent by A. Myrvik:
-“Can a Shop-Vac be used to vacuum bag a part?”

Composite 101, 202 and Advance answer:
There’s few amateur website about composite that promote the use of a vacuum cleaner as an effective vacuum pump to laminate parts. Does it really work or is it an urban legend?

Everyone that vacuum bag and learned by him self by experimenting on his own, looked at his vacuum cleaner and asked him self what if… ?

If you give it a shot with a dry run, by this I mean trying to you vacuum system with the dry material and without resin. It will seem to work fine.
What you use as a bag will shrink onto the material and everything will look great and even if you make a successful vacuum bagging and everything seem great.

there’s a major difference with using a professional tool such as a vacuum pump.
I’ve made that test with my household vacuum. I measured the sucking power of a house hold vacuum vs. a vacuum pump here’s the results.

Here’s what I did, I hooked up a household vacuum cleaner to a vacuum gage to measure the sucking power And then compared it to a vacuum pump.

The extra pressure “weight on the bag” per square foot will squeeze the fiber together, also it will make possible to bring out the excess resin.
-30 inHg is the absolute vacuum. That’s the kind of pressure a professional uses when he vacuum bag.

I would say that a shop-Vac can be a good way to experiment (with fiberglass to keep the price of experimentation low) and make a part has a hobby. But if you are really serious about using vacuum bag you have to get a real vacuum pump and setup a proper vacuum system as describe in Composite 101, 202 and Advance
                                       

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4. Subject for the DVD series.

As previously mention in 2008 we’ll launch the DVD series of hand-on composite project. If there’s a specific project or topic you would like to see covered in this series.

Send me an email at: Cfortier@fiberglasstechnique.com

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Sincerely,
__________________
Mr.Carol Fortier
Project manager
www.fiberglasstechnique.com
Cfortier@fiberglasstechnique.com