Fiberglassing cardboard help

Hi everyone,

I've made all of the pieces for a project i'm working on and it's all corrugated paper (cardboard) I want to add some strength and be able to smooth it for painting. I want to fiberglass the whole thing up but i'm afraid the paper will warp does anyone have some experience they could share with me? what to seal it with? will the resin be enough to seal? should i just do cloth and resin without any sealing?

Thanks for the help

Joe

Corrugated cardboard should be strong enough as is to accept the resin and cloth, especially the double walled stuff. You could coat it with shellac if really feel like sealing it. Test a scrap piece and see if it'll survive on its own.

I read something early about shellac for cardboard so i'll probably try that out if it gets warping from the resin and cloth. Do you have any recommendation for where/what kind of cloth and resin I should buy? whenever I go to home depot i always see the Elmer's one.. but that's the only one I've ever seen at a store some parts are double wall, the rest is single wall and a few different board grades.

Thanks

You should be fine.

There's a ton of people over in the costuming forum (myself included) who regularly use resin and glass cloth to reinforce card stock that's about the weight of a business card. Even saturating the thin card doesn't warp it, and I can tell you from experience that it won't even touch the cardboard aside from sticking to it. Polyester resin doesn't fully penetrate the wood pulp fibers and start to separate them like water does.

Cardboard holds up just fine to fiberglass and resin. Mirroring the suggestion of The_batdemon I would test a small section before you go balls-to-the-wall with it.

Thanks everyone, from what you put here I'm sure everything will go great. Now just to compensate for added allowances