We’ve finished removing the old structural ribs off the bottom shell. One of our advisors, Dana, found that a great way to do this was by applying a heat gun to the ribs and lifting it off the shell with a chisel. The prepreg carbon bottom shell was unaffected by the heat, but the wet carbon ribs, glued in with DP460 epoxy, were very effectively loosened up by the heat.

The shell currently looks like this–there may be small pieces of epoxy residue we still need to remove with the heat gun and chisel, and some areas we may need to sand completely flat. But by and large, the ribs are removed, and the new ones are ready to go in. Speaking of those, we just got the carbon fiber we’re going to make them with–you’ll see that in our next post.