Custom vacuum-bagged composite headrests for a human-powered racing vehicle, fabricated in my garage with no prior composites experience and no access to formal tooling.
In Year 12 our Pedal Prix team needed custom headrests — shaped to fit the driver, light enough to not hurt performance, and strong enough to be safe. Off-the-shelf parts didn't fit. We had no budget for professional fabrication. And I had never made a composite part in my life.
The two problems I had to solve were related but distinct: I needed a way to produce a mould that accurately contoured to a human body without access to CNC machining or proper mould-making materials, and I needed to learn vacuum bagging from scratch — in a garage, with whatever I could source locally.
I didn't know how to make composite parts. So I figured it out.
[ Describe your body-casting approach in detail — what materials you used, how you captured the geometry, what you had to iterate on. What went wrong the first time? What was the specific insight that made it work? ]
[ Be specific and honest here — this section is compelling precisely because it was improvised and resourceful. Don't understate the constraints you were working under. ]
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I learned vacuum bagging entirely from online resources and trial and error. The core variables I had to get right were bag sealing, resin ratios, and the layup schedule. I worked through these iteratively — the first attempts weren't right, but each one taught me something specific.
[ Describe what you got wrong early on and what you learned from it. What was the specific fix? What did the first successful part feel like compared to the failed attempts? ]
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The parts fitted correctly and flew on the competition vehicle. For a first attempt at vacuum-bagged composites in a garage, that was the only metric that mattered.
What I didn't expect was that solving this problem would define the next three years of my engineering work. The same skills — wet layup, vacuum bagging, iterative process development under constraints — now underpin structural work on vehicles targeting Mach 2 and beyond. My most advanced current composites work is a co-cured carbon sleeve architecture for a Mach 3.5 record-attempt rocket.
It started because I needed headrests for a push-bike race.
Finished parts — [ add detail ]
Fitted on the Pedal Prix vehicle