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Originally Posted by Tom Line
Your next choice is how to form the parts. Will you make a male mold? A female mold? Use a spacer material like polystyrene that can be chemically removed?
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I'm not the expert, but frame parts would likely be vacuum bagged in a female mold.
The gearbox plates would be cut from stock plate on a CNC router.
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Fastening things in carbon fiber can be tricky. The strength in a fiber structure comes from the fiber itself. The epoxy is merely there to hold the fiber in the shape you need. Fastening to the carbon fiber incorrectly will crack the epoxy and destroy the structure's strength. You also tend to need backing plates to spread the pressure out.
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The axles in this design are supported by aluminum plates that would distribute the load to the carbon structure.
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Then there's cure times, cure temperatures, mixing ratios, substrate materials......
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I don't know anything about what would be used for these. That might be intentional on the part of our sponsor.
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Originally Posted by cbale2000
Assuming they'd be doing their own layup, and depending on the number of layers it could be anywhere from $100 to $500+ (only for the carbon fiber, not counting the other supplies like epoxy and such). You can get 50" wide carbon fiber cloth for as little as $20 a yard if you look around a bit.
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This could be done in house with the coaching of our sponsor, although that's not what I was imagining when I designed it. I was surprised at how affordably our sponsor could create carbon components.
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Personally if I were to build something like this, I'd use a high compression strength foam core material rather than building it monocoque (plus it's a bit easier to do the layup). Then simply use a lightweight wood for the center material in areas you need to drill holes (sitka spruce is a good option) and then use just 1-2 layers of carbon fiber cloth. You could also make the walls of this design much thinner using such a method.
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I'm not able to picture how this construction method would be used here, but maybe I'm missing something.