This isn't on a celica actually, it is a few pics from me doing my buddie's 85ish toyota truck dash. However, the dash is pretty similar, so I thought I would show it off. Basically, this is my first foray into carbon fiber, so we decided to just take a stab at it, and wrap his dash by hand in CF. Basically, we fixed a few bad spots in the dash (where it was cracked) by filling it with bondo. We also cut some aluminum and filled in that stupid tray. Lessons learned: 1) It would have been WAY easier to vacume bag it. 2) 60 minute work time on epoxy resin means brush time, not cure time. It took 24 hours to actually cure. 3) Stupid us forgot to paint the dash black before starting. Some of the green/brown showed through when we were done. 4) Its hard to keep the carbon fiber held into tight curves. Because in some sections we had to wrap it around the corners, this caused alot of extra work. If we just needed to drape it over something, (for example, an A pillar) it would have been trivial. http://www.garbled.net/tim/album/carbon/index.html
It's expensive stuff. We bought 3 yards, and all the epoxy, and I think it ran about $250. We bought some extra just in case we needed to do multiple layers, or wanted to do some more parts. To do a dash, you need 2 yards, and you will have a bunch left over. As for knowing we could do it, we didn't. He helped me do some glasswork on the celica, and asked me about doing CF work, I said I was game to help him if he was willing to possibly ruin a dash, and we just decided to wing it. It pretty much worked out. We figured if it didn't work, we could just paint it, as his dash was a ruinous mess before we started anyhow. Like I said. I'm fairly confident that A-pillars would be trivial. Actually, given my celica interior, I'm pretty sure A, B and C pillars would all be trivial. I would definately practice some with glass first though, as I have much more skill in that area than he did, and I think that was a large part of why it worked out so well. I will also add, that the fibre is very delicate, and you have to be really careful not to wrinkle or mangle it, especially when cutting it. We actually practiced by carbon fibering a few large rocks from my yard, just to get used to working with it on random shapes. I have the coolest rocks in the world now. I will probably do a few more pieces on my wife's EVO eventually, if I do, I'll update the album and let people here know.
I think start to finish, it took about 5 hours, including the play around-time to learn how it worked.
