First Vacuum Bag

After the soluble core is wrapped, the layup needs to be compacted/debulked and excess resin must removed to achieve a proper resin/carbon ratio. This is supposedly accomplished with a vacuum bag. Following the Poor Man's Vacuum Bagging article, I constructed a vacuum bag test from 2mil painter's drop plastic, a Harbor Freight vacuum pump (for HVAC work), and a sticky mastic tape from ebay.

The Harbor Freight pump is awful. It atomizes a surprisingly large amount of oil into the air to operate. The oil fog settles on every surface in the work shop, and that is simply unacceptable.

The sticky mastic was not sticky. It felt more like plumbers puddy. The bag seals leaked so much the pump was not able to achieve -40kPa vacuum inside the bag. Also, unacceptable.

First vacuum bag was a failure.