Sunday, January 8, 2012

Most of carbon fiber in place on plugs

I bought 72 2" paint brushes, 15 yards of carbon fiber, peel plies, bleeder film, vacuum bagging film, West Systems 105 epoxy with 205 (fast) hardener and 206 (slow hardener)... and more.

Now I finally have some carbon fiber in place on both the fork plug and base plug.  My calculations suggest that relative to the time to just lay down the carbon fiber to this point, I have spent about 100 hours.. Here it is:

Carbon Fiber at last!

The picture depicts both the base and front fork plugs covered in carbon fiber.  This has been a learning process (and I am still learning!).  After some disappointing results (waviness in the carbon fiber), I changed the process of building up the carbon fiber to using smaller pieces in order that problems are limited to smaller area.  This helped to reduce the problems as well.

At this stage, I have used around 25 paint brushes.  Often I put down a few pieces of carbon fiber per paint brush.  So I would guess that I have put down around 50 pieces of carbon fiber.  It is a slow process.

At this point, I still have more layers of carbon fiber to complete.  This is especially true for the areas of the bike that will be under a lot of stress -- head tube, center of base, and rear fork area.  The front fork with the exception of the crank area, is nearly complete in relation to layers of carbon fiber.



No comments:

Post a Comment