RE: painting mold before layup
Bobs right. Frekote is used in those molds in my experience, but we may be muddying the water for Anthony talking about production work, plus the storage of the prepreg, the tooling, and autoclave system to cure it are way beyond what he is wanting to do. I've only seen aluminum molds made and that was with mills and lathes but Bob hit the nail on the head, the tooling is a lot more expensive but the results from prepreg are beautiful and you can get the same finish every time.
I haven't seen how they do boats, just the SAE competition race cars, but I'd like to see the boat layup.
Steve, what were you making and how did the Duplicolor hold up? I've used Duplicolor a couple times but it's adhesion when using nitro was poor. Don't get me wrong, I'd use it in some cases.
Tim