HELP! Fiberglassing eva foam

[Benthewander]

So im quite new to making eva foam armor, and i messed up and bought fiberglass cloth/mat aswell as fiberglass resin, and i want to put it to use by fiberglassing the armor pieces to harden the armor and to be able to mount other things to it... Is this possible to do and what is the procedure? Thank you

 

[cavx]

Search YouTube for this. I am pretty sure the guys that do this fiberglass over the foam, then use Bondo to give them a surface that can be sanded smooth. When I did my Pred Bio, I glassed directly to the foam and it worked a treat. I used a combination of D65 plastic and epoxy resin to seal the fiberglass and make it smooth. It came out quite heavy, but I like it.

 

[Customrelic]

You can do fiberglass over foam like Cavx said. And bondo would be my choice for a finished surface. There really isnt alot of choices with that.

 

[cavx]

Having used or tested pretty much everything out there, I decided I am not a fan of either Fiberglass or Bondo. I don't think white PVA glue is good enough and Plastidip is over priced for what it does.

So I ran tests using D65 plastic and found you can layer this stuff up (mixing small batches) with cloth soaked in to make a hard shell. Normally you mix this my volume, but you can mix on scales using 10:9 ratio. I was generally mixing 20 + 18 grams at a time.

Epoxy also works and you have a longer work time. If you part is supported from underneath and positioned over a tray, you can collect the drips and recycle them until the gel state kicks in.

The beauty of these products is no smell and no itch. You can also add pigments to tint the resins so they are colour fast.

 

[RocFoamArmory]

If you're going for fiberglass and bondo you should probably not use foam. Use pepakura instead.
- The foam will add thickness and then the layers of cloth and bondo will make things really thick and heavy.
- Foam won't save you much time at all if you're going to harden it anyway.
- The point of foam is to be light and slightly flexible.
- Also, foam armor tends not to have as much detail in it as pepakura, just a nature of the material. Adding bondo may reduce the detail even further and just add more work.
- Some resins can eat through the foam. I don't know which ones will, but that would be a project-killer for me.

That being said I hope you can make good progress on whatever piece you're making!