Constructed from vacuum-bagged marine ply and Herex panels, and solid fiberglass sheet.

When building solid glass panels, build small ones (no larger than about 24"x24") and use a breather fabric on the bottom layer because air can get trapped underneath because of all of the layers. 1 layer carbon + 7 layers 18 oz cloth was about 1/8 - 3/16 inch thick; 2 more layers of 28 oz quadraxial brought the total to 1/4"+. It's also helpful to make a sort of mandrel by coating a thick piece of plywood with contact paper and laminating directly on top of it.

The assembly jig described in the plans would be more useful if it also marked the location of the bolt holes.

I vacuum-bagged the DBM1208 tape on one of the modules, and laminated it on the second by hand. There's not much difference. DBM1208 absorbs approximately twice its weight in resin either way.

Here are some photos from vacuum bagging layers of 8oz tape over the CMM beam pads. There are some do's and don'ts in the sequence:

Clockwise from upper left: 1) the beam pads, made from ash, 2) the bag before vacuum, 3) vacuum being drawn, 4) full vacuum, 5) bag sealer, 6) vacuum port.

Note that the vacuum port isn't directly on any of the materials to be laminated. Note also that there's no bleeder/breather in the bag except what's under the port. This is bad. You can see from photo 4 that a full vacuum was drawn but the bag left wrinkles in the laminates that required a lot of sanding. The poly rope in photo 3 helps to get air from all parts of the bag, but be careful not to place it too close to the laminates or it will fill with resin and become it's own special composite part. The seals visible in photos 5 and 6 are from ACP. They work well but are difficult to apply and remove.

When vacuum bagging a small part such as the beam compression pads, make sure the part sits on top of a support inside the vacuum bag, such as a 2x4 block wrapped in plastic, or a piece of plywood larger than the part, wrapped in plastic. This should prevent the bottom of the bag from wrapping up around the sides and pushing the side laminates up. You can see in photo 4 that the bag is wrapping up the sides of the pads, which had to be sanded and re-laminated.

Why bother vacuum bagging these parts at all?  Epoxy doesn't like to stick to ash particularly well.  Maybe because it's so dense, or maybe it was too smooth, but my initial tests showed that the fiberglass wasn't going to adhere well without some help.

Some pictures of gluing the CMM ends in the jig and vacuum-bagging the tape reinforcement.