The veneer is about 1/42 of an inch thick so like the thickness of your thumbnail. It isnt really flexible until you spray it with the veneer softener that I bought at the veneersupplies website.....that has to soak for about 12 hours then the veneer becomes much more flexible without cracking. That veneer softener that Joe sells is the key to making it flexible. those near 90 degree bends on the console cover and even the back piece of the console were killer....and it cracked on me a bit there. But with some sanding and a little more epoxy I was able to make it look pretty nice.
As far as cutting it.....I tried the razor blade and X-acto knife route and it doesnt work well near the knotted parts of the grain.....what I found works well is some nice sharp scissors.....like a Friskas type. THe scissors actually work very very well.
epoxy adhesive: I actually used an expensive kind that I knew would work well.....but I am not sure I needed to use something so expensive. The nice thing about using an epoxy for the adhesive is that it will soak into the grain of the wood and is very sandable.
Heres the epoxy I used......its probably overkill and too expensive but Ive used it before and it works well you could probably get by with something less expensive:
http://www.systemthree.com/store/pc/T-88-c27.htm
As far as the vacuum bagging process:
This might work:
http://www.harborfreight.com/air-vac...ors-96677.html
I thought of doing it that way but I didnt......and I think that way could work instead of building or buying the more sophisticated pumps like on joewoodworker.com or other sites. Just buy the correct connections and vacuum bag supplies and u could give it a try. $12 for the pump thing at Harbor Freight....might be worth a shot. U have to make sure to buy high quality bagging material or the bag will puncture being used with sharp metal parts. Plus I had to put a bunch of styrofoam underneat and around some of the parts....near the edges cause when the vacuum bag wraps around the parts tightly around the aharp corners......it could puncture. Also, sometimes the vacuum is strong enough to want to bend the metal parts....so adding styrofoam or wood for rigidity provides support to the metal keeping it from bending. Epoxy bonds to foam but its easy to break away and sand off.....where wood or something else is a bit of a problem.
I used a FoodSaver bagging machine (I used this for my small carbon fiber projects).....that U use to vacuum bag food. FoodSaver makes their own bags and bag rolls that u can cut to a desired length. My machine only did 11 inches wide so that can be limiting on some of the console parts. For larger pieces I bought a Foodsaver jar top adapter (its hose connected to the FoodSaver machine) and made my own large vacuum bags out of vacuum bagging material. I used this method for the large console top piece and the dash center piece and the bagging material was so good and strong that the vacuum being pulled started to fold the top metal console piece in half.....actually bent it. So that wasnt good. So some of the stuff required aome experimentation.