A wise manager at work once said "if you work on something it gets better." He was really speaking of working on issues but I think this applies to me since fiberglassing used to be an issue for me. As I progress toward the end of this project I'm feeling really good about the journey and the improvement of several of my skills.
I created a rectangular template in Illustrator (21" x 50") and used it to cut a single piece of glass cloth at a 45˚ angle, again for maximum strength. After masking the shoulder of payload section with masking tape I laid this cloth strip on the tube and tacked it in place with a few brush loads of epoxy. It's interesting that the 45˚ cloth deforms in a way that makes it difficult to maintain adequate width and coverage on the 20" payload tube. I had to continuously stretch the cloth to width every 6" of length or so. I also learned to brush downward at a 45˚ angle rather than across or lengthwise. This makes sense in retrospect but I had to figure it out on the fly. When I'd applied the total length of cloth (2.1 wraps worth) I then squeegeed the excess resin out of the layers. This minimizes weight without detriment to strength:
I think you can tell that this is an extremely uniform layer. Next I started on the upper portion of the sustainer but this time I chose 0˚ cloth rather than 45˚. The reason is that the majority of this 40" long tube is filled with either motor rube/rings or the coupler of the payload section. There's only about a 4" gap in the tube so I don't really need the extra strength of the 45˚ hassle. I applied the same technique as above and here's the result:
I allowed both to cure and they're über tough now.
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