R6 Dome v1.0 (ugly placeholder)

Once I had the body built, and a skirt attached, I knew that I needed to get a dome sitting on it ASAP. I decided that I’d stick to what was working, and build a composite dome. I thought that I could rough out an R6 Dome to be molded and cast in a weekend so that I’d have a place-holder piece to help visualize things as I moved forward. Of course, the weekend turned into a week.

I first modeled the dome in Fusion360 using the dimensions found in the Club Blueprints area. I then used this model to cut a reduced foam core on my CNC router out of blue insulation foam which was glued up to provide the height. (again, I have no pictures of this part of the build… sadly). I applied a surface coat of Glass reinforced body filler, knocked that back with a rasp then coated that with regular body filler and started sanding… This filling and sanding is what made my weekend project last a week! Luckily, I had some help with the sanding…

Once I was reasonably happy with the model, I went ahead and created a polyester mold. Because I was not going to be pulling a lot of parts from this mold I did not want to spend a lot of time and money on it. I simply used materials that I had readily on hand in my shop. By the end of the day I had what I considered one of the ugliest molds I have done, but it would be serviceable.
I quickly layed-up a composite dome and when I separated the mold I was quite pleased with the result. I had to take down the small seam and use a little filler before the primer but I was happy to have a Dome sitting on R6-T3x. I did not think, however, that this would be the final piece and I’ll get more into that later.

Build Logs