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Randy Pflanzer
Technology Professionals Consortium
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Expanded Foot Box

     To expand the box, I needed to build a form.  I choose to use a block of blue styrene that I buy from an aircraft parts supplier.  I like it because I can glue it together with epoxy very easily, it sands very easily, and it is fairly rigid so it will hold shapes very well.  I use a wood hand saw to cut the block into 1" slabs that I then glue together to form the mold.  You'll see what I mean below.

     Here's an in-between picture of the process of building the form.  I use 60 second epoxy to quickly join parts together.  The idea is to build the outside shape that I want.  I don't care about the inside shape because after I glass the outside, I will remove the blue foam from the inside.

     Here is what my finished foot box looks like before I applied the fiberglass cloth.  This view is with the body upside down, so you are looking at the bottom of the box.  It is indented so that it will fit in the frame rails.

     Here's a picture of the finished box from the top.  The body is resting on its right side.

     I then applied two plies of 9 ounce fiberglass bi-directional cloth to the mold.  I actually applied the glass in 4 pieces and overlapped them about an inch.  I was also careful to overlap the body panels by about two inches.  This will all be finished smooth with body filler, sanded, and painted with the engine compartment during the finishing stage.

     This picture is looking inside the cockpit with the body laying on its right side.  Once the glass dried, I removed the blue foam and sanded the inside with 80 grit sandpaper.  Although I don't have a picture of it, I then applied two layers of fiberglass mat that I got at the auto parts store to all the inside parts of the new box, and then I covered that with 1 layer of fiberglass cloth, again overlapping the body panels about 2 inches.  For now, that finishes up the box.  As I install the gas pedal, I may need to reinforce the mounting points but I'll do that later when I install the pedals.

     There are additional pre-body assembly steps to be completed and I plan to work on them as filler around the bigger jobs.  I'll update this page as I get to those remaining steps.

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