Well, then. The books, DVD and factory tour will give you a pretty good idea of the mold creation and use. In general, the process stars with creating the "plug", this is the part that you want to produce which is the console in your case. You can use wide variety of material to create the plug if it will be created from scratch as opposed to duplicating an existing one. Wood, plastic, certain types of foam can also be used, card boards, fleece fabric, fillers to fill gaps and fair the surface. When I was working on a project on my garage, I took a note that a drop of resin fell on the shrinkable plastic I use for my RC models and it did not affect it or burn through it but I did not put this into any practical use/test yet. Just something I remember.
After you get the plug to an exact representation of your part including the very smooth finish using putties a lot of sanding and fairing, you will start the waxing process. You will wax on and wax off until you are 100% convinced that the karate kid was enjoying a pleasure cruise.
Then you will start glassing over the plug. Start with non continues fabric such as torn pieces of csm. Keep building up until the cover the whole surface. Don't add too much layers too fast or the generated heat with cook your laminate. Around the corners and sharp turns, you will need braces to prevent deformation. These are cut stripes of fiber glass going along the turn. If you don't get this by the end of your studies, I can post a picture to demonstrate for you.
After you are done glassing, add a base if you want out of anything you want. The outside layer of the glass is all yours to do with it whatever you want. It is the inside layer is what you care about.
After the glass is cured, you will insert plastic wedges to separate the mold (the glass) from the plug (the model of the part)
Be careful here and don't be forceful, patience is a virtue at this time. If you did a good job waxing, it will separate eventually.
The glass part is your mold. The negative, if you will, that you will be creating your parts out of. The mold itself can't be 2-color or multi-color mold. However with creative and strategic use/design of space, panels and break lines, it can produce good quality multi-color parts. I will explain this shortly.
To prepare the mold for use, you will wax the inner layer of the mold until you really hate waxing. every hidden corner and edges. every millimeter square until you prefer to live in the dark than to light a candle when you lose power simply because you want nothing to do with wax. I think by now you got the idea of how important waxing is to the successful outcome of the process.
To get your color effect, mask off around the color 1 area, it will help great deal concealing any imperfections if this area has natural boundaries in the design. For example, if this area is a recessed panel . Spray the color 1 gelcoat. before it cures, remove the tape. If you have any raised edges, smooth them out with a razor blade. make sure the area around is very well masked off. Any imperfections on the waxed surface will show in your actual part.
Now, without masking off anything, spray your color 2 on top of everything including color one. Only the outer layer of color one will show. Color 2 will hide behind color 1 and will show elsewhere in the final product.
When the gel cures, start the process of inserting layers of glass, core, glass core (if any), etc until you are done. If your glassing schedule involves so many layers, watch out for heat. Don't lay down too much too fast.
let everything cures over night and use the same plastic wedges techniques to separate the part from the mold.
To use the mold again, you need to wax again, exactly like before and repeat the process. Glass, core (if any) and so on
There are so many fine details that this overview doesn't cover so it is not a replacement or substitution of your planed coming studies. For example, the first layer of glass that you will put over the gel (which is the most outer layer of the part) should not be heavy or textured as most structural fabrics like woven or bi-axial are. The reason is you want the pattern of the fabric to telegraph through the gelcoat. The process also can get really tricky with some complicated shapes or surface features.
Best of luck to you.
