A Look At Some of the Equipment

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First item we see here is the vacuum pump set up. We have the pump with a vacuum gauge on top, connected to a paint pot used as a resin catcher to protect the pump. You have to make sure the resin never reaches the pump. If it does, you will have to buy a new pump. Any resin that gets though the panel and comes towards the pump, will be caught in the paint pot. The preventative measures placed on the panel worked very well and we never had any resin even get into the vacuum hose running from the table to the paint pot. The whole affair is mounted on a little trolley on wheels so it can be moved around with ease. The black plastic hose is the hose coming from the table.

Next we have the resin reservoir. You can see the resin input lines that go right to the bottom of the bucket. Make sure you do not allow air into these lines once you start your infusion process. The hoses are attached to the sides of the bucket with wire to make sure they do not move off the bottom once the process starts. You will want to cut the hoses at an angle to allow resin to enter the hoses from the bottom of the bucket. We are using "Vice Grips" as valves for the the resin. This will allow us to open or close any hose as the infusion goes on.

We now have the full vacuum applied and the bag is down tight. We do have leaks and are trying to find them now. If the leaks are too severe, you will jeopardize the infusion and you might end up with a dry spot on the panel. We see our resin reservoir and feed lines going to our three distribution hoses.

We are ready to roll. Larisa is holding the reservoir up off the floor. You need the reservoir to be as close to the level of the table as possible to assist in the drawing out of the resin. You can see two areas where we were trying to solve leak problems. The areas are enclosed with the yellow sticky tape. We figured the leaks could have been caused by a problem joint in the table and that would let air into the bag from the bottom. Even with the leaks, we managed to pull 17 on the gauge. Steve had managed 25 previously on some other items they made on this table but Derek felt we could go with 17. So, off we went.