I want to make a front fender and ram-air tubes out of carbon fiber for my gixxer - it's not a stuntbike (or fiberglass with a carbon top sheet if it's cheaper), I have the stock parts, so how do I go about making molds of them?
I have worked with fiberglass before, so I assume carbon is similar, but never made my own molds, or parts from molds before

where is a good place to get carbon fiber cloth and resin? ebay?? will the same resin for fiberglass work with carbon fiber cloth?

anyone with info plz enlighten me

 

wow where to start? first off do some good searches as i'm sure you have. you'll find there are endless ways to use carbon fiber cloth and methods to make molds.

real carbon fiber pieces(race car, aircraft parts) are made completely different than a piece made for instance, a honda civic hood.

the hood may look nicer, (due to the gel coat/ "glossy" finish) but it really is no different than making a fiberglass piece. just like fiberglass, your enemy in making pieces and laying layers is air being trapped. this will result in a poor looking piece that will no doubt give you problems with longevity. Also, gel coat only looks good for so long, put it in the sun and you will see in no time it haze and turn yellowish. Easy solution for this is to have the pieces clearcoated with a high quality UV resistant clear coat. This will than enable you to wet sand and polish the pieces to a mirror finish. Benefit to the "fibergalss" method for carbon fiber pieces is low price, great finish, and fairly simple method to make. Downsides: not much stronger than fiberglass, heavier than true carbon fiber method.

true carbon fiber pieces: similar method to the fiberglass method in terms of laying layers and molds but that is it. true carbon fiber pieces first off use different chemicals/ resins than those listed above, also no gel coat. Same idea in layering. After laying your cloth and applying resins the pieces are than vacuum bagged to ensure all air is removed and to ensurea true duplication of the mold. The piece is than put into an autoclave, basically a big pressurized low tem oven to be cured. The result is a low gloss, low weight, very strong piece. Benefits: strength and weight. Drawbacks: uh, it's a pain in the *** and costly. i don't think many of us have an autoclave in our garage.

this is just a quick over view, like i said earlier, do some searches on line and you will find out more than you ever needed to know about carbon fiber.

as far as the molds. do some searches, you'll see its easy to make a high strength low cost mold. as for the air ducts, youl need to make a two piece mold. definitely more work involved here. it may be worth the single mold for the fender but not the ducts.

well, good luck, hope this helped out some. look forward to seeing what you make. by the way you'll end up with a bunch of pieces trying to get just the cloth to lay out just right. what you do with the garbage pieces is paint a cool two tone/ or graphics leaving good carbon fiber sections exposed.

 

Thanks... that did help. I did search online but didn't find anything too useful, but I'll keep looking.

For the air-ducts I've given it some thought and what I think I'll do is cut them in half along their seam, then mold each half, then make the halfs and attatch them with carbon or epoxy. Im not making load-bearing parts, so they just have to be light and look half decent.

I know how parts are made from pre-impregnated carbon-fiber, but that's out of my league, and good idea painting and leaving some carbon exposed... I like that.

This is definetly gonna be an interesting project... More people please gimme your input.

This was useful too: http://www.fibreglast.com/VBulletin/...ead.php?t=3521

 

I went and made a fiberglass panel for some speakers for my car, did the same thing, worked great. good luck

 

got some good info from another site... just thought I'd post it if anyone wants to know:
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resins for glass are the same as graphite for this situation. something like a (westsystems) 205 epoxy and 206 hardener takes about 24 hrs to cure but is better than the shorter ones.

the process is pretty similar to glass; making moulds though is the important one.

for those sort of shapes i would suggest you would prob want to make them from a hard mould.

a first option would be to get some glass and safe release. clean the fender or tube (if the tubes separate into two halves like some do that would be much better) coat lightly with the safe release and wet lay the glass ontop to make a female mould to then make your job with. from here you could either lay your carbon up on the inside or you could make a male mould from the female mould for the consolidation and the cure stage.

normally you would want to vacuum bag it at the least to ensure consolidation of the layers and the resin (free from bubbles and stuff) otherwise it can break down or just look shitty. the reason i suggested male and female moulds is because you prob don;t have the facilities to vacuum and this way you can lay up on one mould and place onto/into the other mould which you then pressure together and wait for the parts to cure.

the second option would be to lay the graphite straight on top of the part same as making the mould but here you will likely have a good surface finish on the inside and crap on the outside.

remember it is very hard to get the best finish when doing this sort of work and thats one of the reasons parts normally cost so much. the problems i would anticipate would be edges... you can cut with diamond coated scissors but most else would just blunt and damage the job. and fitments especially if trying to fit two halves of a tube together.

the final product isn't as sharp and neat as an abs plastic injection such as suzuki made the originals with but good luck with it.

 

just get the vinyl carbon fiber pattern overlays and stick it to the fender

 

you can scuff the fiberglass parts and lay a few layers of CF over with 'glass resin also. strong as fiberglass with the carbon look. make sure your top layer of CF is straight and nice and free of bubbles.
CF takes MANY layers to get to a good thickness, and that **** ain't cheap at all.

 

the point is the strenght

 

Thats how we do them at work. As well as front fenders and tails

 

ahhh i thought he just wanted the look

 

if it's not weight bearing, then why need to be strong?

a few layers of CF on top of a glass peice will be plenty strong enough if it's laid right.

 

well it's a bit of both. The parts aren't load bearing so i don't care too much about strength. I want the parts to be light and to look good.

the vinyl carbon-look stuff looks like crap when you get up to it, and you can tell it's fake. I want the real-deal... or at least glass with a top layer so it's looks real enough. Then if it works out I can mess around and make some more cool stuff.

 

fenders are load bearing if youre doing podiums ... i see em snap all the time ..

i would love to get a set of all CF bodywork