Carbon hood and trunk lid

I got started on the carbon hood and trunk lid this weekend and it's been pretty slow going. The problem is that it is pretty cold outside and the epoxy that I got likes about 85 degrees to cure. It's taking forever to cure, and wetting out the carbon is a little tricky when the epoxy gels on the cold spots. Radiant heaters help, but not enough.

On top of that, I ordered the wrong S-Glass from Aircraft Spruce...it is WAY too lightweight to do anything to the structure. Of course I used it anyway and now the hood and trunk lid are too thin. Now I get to order 3 more yards of carbon and 8 more yards of 8oz. S-glass. Hopefully with 4 more layers of glass and carbon the pieces will hold their shape a little better. End weight should be about 8-10lbs for the hood and 5lbs for the trunk lid. I'm also going to try a different epoxy. The stuff I'm looking at cures in 30 minutes and has a good cold cure down to 40 degrees. Hopefully that saves the day.

I'm not really sure if the weight savings are going to justify all the work going into this, but it's pretty fun and I'm learning quite a bit. For example, Meguire's car wax works 1000x better than PVA mold release. That was a waste of money, and probably made the parts stick even worse. All in all I'm guessing a savings of about 85lbs (30lbs from the hood, 40lbs from the roof, 15lbs from the trunk lid).

In other news, I ordered an Odyssey PC680 battery, that should save another 30lbs or so. I need to check the SCCA rules to see if I can mount it in the cabin, near the passenger seat. I would mount it under the hood, but heat is never a good thing for batteries, especially being near the turbo.