More body finishing work today now that the spray paint has dried. It took a couple hours of wet sanding with a small flexible block to knock off most of the heavy scratches. This is by no means flat, as you can see by the paint color remaining in streaks. To really get it smooth, there is a lot more finishing work needed. How smooth does it really need to be for a seat? It won't be a production item, so I'm okay cutting corners in overall smoothness quality.
Instead of another round of paint, which wouldn't really fill in the deeper areas, to add a layer of tinted epoxy and fiberglass. This serves two purposes: 1. Provides some thickness for smoothing the surface, 2. Seals any holes & cracks around the joint between the Bondo and plastic (air leaks would be bad during bagging). So far, I only added a single layer of 1.4oz glass, and that's not much thickness. Before going to be tonight, I'll add another layer of raw epoxy to fill the weave and provide a bit more thickness for sanding off after it cures. This has the beginnings of too much work...
I also laid up a 2x2 inch test coupon of the candidate 1.4oz + (3x) 6oz + 2mm Soric + (2x) 6oz glass layup schedule. The Soric certainly took as much resin as I threw at it, but otherwise was quite nice to work with. It'll be interesting to pull the coupon out from the vacuum bag tomorrow and feel how flexible it is. Cutting to a specific, known size, I can also get a rough idea of the total seat weight by making an educated guess at the seat's area. The original go-kart seat weight was 15lb and the half-seat weight was about 6lb. If I can come back to 6lb with a whole lot more stiffness, I'll consider that a win. Certainly I can keep pulling weight from the seat by varying the lamination schedule and core material.
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