I am laminating unidirectional carbon fiber on the edges of the beam supports ( I call them spars). A vacuum bag is used here also along with a temporary partial mold. It is quite difficult to control the final thickness of the laminate, I had to do it in two steps to obtain 10 mm. This is for the aft spar. For the forward spar, my FEM analysis tells me I need 15 mm. My vacuum pump works very well. I plugged it to a programmable electronic timer so it does not run all the time. I have a 10 hours cure cycle in which the pump runs about 10 minutes per hour. I am fine-tuning this at every run but it is very nice to start the pump and then forget about it and go drink a beer or something...
