Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

In the start of construction on my teardrop, I am seeking the best material for the exterior covering. I have seen aluminum covered trailers badly battered by the hails we have here at 6,500 feet in the Rockies. I have discovered that the latest permutations of FRP and Filon apparently are now largely UV resistant. That factor is totally significant to me and I have been unable to discover if this material is thermo formable. I want to be able to take a sheet of this material and heat it to form around an angle on the trailers' exterior.

I hope someone has had practical experience in trying to heat and form this materiaL.

Thanks for your interest in this subject.

Gene So

I'm in the thermoforming business. My specialty is thin gauge (under 40 mil) but i dabble.
Any glass filled plastic like frp is very difficult to heat and bend. The glass fibers dont stretch.
A 90 deg bend would be difficult as well because you will have a hard time getting the heat uniform with a heat gun. But i wish you the best of luck

My popup has a frp roof and was damaged a few years ago by 1" hail.
The only damage occured on the tight radius on the front. It has 7 cracked holes which i patched. The flat field is just fine

Polyester resins are thermosetting, meaning that once they're cured they'll burn before they soften. While the glass fibers themselves are flexible, the resin sheathing them is not. The gel coat applied to Filon et al should have always been UV stable ?...

If you made your own sheets from epoxy and cloth, you could do that, since epoxies soften at around 100 degC...but I'm sure there are better and more cost-effective ways than that.
Depending on your 'handy-ness', it's not much of a learning curve to lay up the 90 section yourself and use Filon for the flat panels. Even a rank amateur can get a decent finish on a small part.

Wobbly Wheels wrote:Even a rank amateur can get a decent finish on a small part.

Speaking from the perspective of an epoxy and glass weave rank amateur, I can second this statement. The first part I ever made was a small speaker pod for the kick panel of my old P/U truck. Not pretty, but came out okay, and could have been nicer if I had taken more time on it. The second thing I ever did of note was to cover the front radius of TPCE, and that came out pretty good, if 'n I do say so myself.