This guide will illustrate the fun experience I had designing, shaping and fibergladding my cool air intake. You will see how to manipulate resin and fiberglass into shapes your mind and hands can bring to life. Important: always wear gloves. Fiberglass fibers are very sharp and can easily get into your skin. The resulting itch will make worst poison ivy rash or moskito bite feel like a rain drop!

I purchased my fiberglass, resin and tape from www.uscomposites.com. Excellent prices and super service and very informative website to boot. Resin I am using is 3:1 and I think medium thickness(viscosity - gives you about 20 to 25min working time before it starts to harden). I am using 2" wide fiberglass tape, I forget thickness, feeels like 0.03 or so. If you don't plan on having alot of curves and bends, then you can use wider tape.

Method described here is called "Lost Foam Method." It's named that because you make the mold, skin it in fiberglass and resin and later when you remove the core, the mold is destroyed.

We'll start by filling in the void where we want the intake to figure out how much space you have:

Tips: cover all the surfaces in newspaper/plastic wrap or other easy to remove liner material. use tape to hold edges down. Cover all surfaces that will come in contact with expanding foam. There are probably better materials, but this was handy and I had few cans of it.

Cut/carve/sand into the desired shape. I chose a to model is after the iceman intake. I'm calling it monster cool air intake. Filter will be 4" opening.

Once you have shape you want, verify it fits and clears all the hoses, hood bracing, hood prop rod and what not. I used scotch masking tape and found it not sticky enough (they make varying stickiness, but this was what I had on hand). I found a roll of duct tape and used that. Very manageable and conforms well to the curves.

I then sprayed it with some lacquer wood paint (this will be my release agent), i'm hoping paint will flake off the tape xx cross ur fingers).

First layer of fiberglass was then applied using short pieces (3 to 8") of 2" wide fiberglass using 3M multi-purpose spray glue to hold the fiberglass to the painted surface. Resin was then applied and allowed to dry.

Prior to applying second layer, I sanded down in major imperfections and repeated same glue/fiberglass/resin process.

I think 3 layers will do fine, if not, 4 layers.

Keep in mind the expanding foam doesn't melt like the pink foam from home depot, so i'll have to find different solvent or mechanically remove it.

Update:

Remove the foam core and added anothe coat of resin with 3M glass bubbles (to make resin thicker).

And the inside shot:

As you can see the spray paint came off quite easily from the ducttape. Worked better than I expected.

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