POPPEM: 2018

The Basics of Carbon Fiber Manufacturing | Carbon Fiber Trumpet Build Log: Bladder molding – Vacuum molding is ideal for making parts that are single halves of a shell. Think about a bottle cut in half. With vacuum molding you could make each half of the bottle, but if you wanted to make the whole thing as one piece then you would use bladder molding. Basically you have a two part mold of what you want to mold, then you put the wet carbon fiber over a “bladder” (usually a latex balloon) and you inflate the bladder so that the carbon fiber gets pushed to the outside of the mold. When the part is cured, you can just pull the bladder out of the part and take the mold off the part. The pressure from the bladder is what compresses the carbon fiber. This creates a very high quality part, similar to that created with vacuum molding. It is perfect when the outside surface of the part needs to be perfect and the inside doesn’t matter very much.