I initially used this techniques to make a fuel tank. I decided that it wouldn't take long to carve a blank from Styrofoam, lay up onto it and when it had cured I would cut an opening in the top and pour cellulose thinners into it; melting the Styrofoam hey-presto a tank. Surprisingly enough it worked just like that. I didn't take any pictures of the foam blank, but I have plenty of the tank.

1. Cut the foam and sand with 60-80 grit production paper, this will remove foam quite fast. Take care not to catch the edge of the prody paper it will rip bits of foam out. Its easy to get quite a smooth finish on the foam, but its not that important.
2. Before laying up follow the usual routine with patterns before cutting any fabric.
3. Paint the foam with epoxy, if its a tank and the top and bottom are going to be layed up a few hours apart, only paint the surface to be layed up. This makes the fabric stick to the foam, otherwise it will fall off the foam at the first opportunity.
4. The best way of laying up fabric, well the way I do it, is to place the fabric on a piece of polythene of a similar size to the biggest piece that is going to be used. Then paint resin on the fabric and squeegee the resin into it. For the first layer make sure its resin rich. Then lift the polythene and put the fabric on the foam and peel the polythene off. To minimize resin waste use the same piece of polythene each time.
5. If you carefully squeezed out the air while putting successive layers of fabric on, the lay up should be quite good. When you do it like this it ends up resin rich. Once I am satisfied that I have got all the fabric on and it's OK I squeegee resin out. One problem of doing this is disturbing it and getting voids.
6. After about two hours turn the tank over and lay up the top, just as you did the underneath. You are now trying for an overlap between the bottom and top. If you thought about this when making the blank this shouldn't be a great problem. If it is make the best possible job its possible to fix this when it has cured.
7. The final layer of carbon should be free of small pieces of carbon and well consolidated. You can then paint it with epoxy, if you are using SP115 it should look like Figure 1, this is without any refinishing.
8. You can sand it down and repaint it and it retains the clear resin and shiny carbon look, except if you sand right through a layer of fabric then you will get the different layers of fabric showing.

The parts on the menu that were made like this are: seat unit, petrol tank, air filter plenums and dash. last updated 03/12/2001.

Foam is available as house insulation an 8'x2' x 75mm[?] piece of blue Styrofoam/polystyrene costs between £10-£30. Blue foam is OK the white foam has a much courser structure and would be hard to finish.

Glue pieces together to get the thickness you need, use PVA glue for this. However you will have to leave a day to set. If you try and sand PVA and foam you will end up with a mess. Before you glue pieces together cut the bits to be laminated as close to the final shape as you can and don't allow the glue where the finished surface will be.

To cut foam I use a hot wire. It is just a piece of resistance wire[34" has 3.7 Ohm resistance]stretched on a frame and connected to a car battery. This slices through foam nicely.

Foam Suppliers

• Sevenoaks heating Supplies. Sevenoaks Kent