Progress!
Last night I CF'ed and glassed the plywood sled. I haven't glassed something in quite this fashion before, with bolts embedded in the layup so it was pretty fun to do.
First up, prepare all the parts for lamination.
All my cloth is cut to size, pop sticks made handy and 3 layers of gloves installed on my hands (one layer per side, one layer to stop bleed through and for setting up the vacuum with - nitrile gloves are too hard/expensive to come by here.)
First on goes the carbon with the weave spread out using a closed pair of scissors. Some of the fibres were damaged by doing this which was unexpected but overall seems to have worked out quite well. I had to put nuts on the bolts to ensure they would stay level, which I had not planned on. The nuts have packing tape over them so the epoxy won't stick. There are extra strands of carbon on the two weak sections on the outside of the bolt pairs, and a couple over the section behind the switch. I'm assured by a mech. engineer that this will help carry strain, however I'm doubtful. Either way it's no extra effort so I figured I might as well.
At this point my hands are too epoxied to be handling expensive cameras, so no more pictures. I added two layers of glass to the side, and then put the peel ply on/wet it out and then flipped the whole thing over.
With the slight gap between the bolt and the wood, I was expecting to be able to get some JB weld down the gap. Having not used it for 6 or so months I had forgotten how thick it was. In the future, I need to apply JB weld or other epoxy to the bolts BEFORE application of carbon/glass on that side, not try and do it all from one side. Oh well, lesson learnt
Once the JB weld was on the bolts and squished through as much as possible to the other side, the same layup for carbon glass glass peelply followed.
I added two layers of regular cleanup cloth on either side of the assembly as breather and then pulled a slight vacuum on it. Yes, its a polyethelene lunch bag, with some blutac as sealant - don't knock it, it works wonders on small parts!
I'm only putting -20in-hg of vac on it, as last week I imploded a vacuum chamber so i'm taking it easy. What the heck is -20in of hg you might ask... and why the hell am I using such an archaic measurement... well thats what the people who make my vacuum gauge decided to use. kPa, Bar, even PSI gauge would have been more sensible - oh well. An in my head calculation puts this at ~0.7kg/cm which is fine for this.