Carbon frame covers NC35

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Spacey
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Posts: 20
Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2014 3:50 pm
Bike owned: RVF400
Location: Pretoria, South Africa
Re: Carbon frame covers NC35

Post by Spacey » Thu Nov 24, 2016 2:26 pm

Hi There,

Well to be honest that would be a whole lot more work really. Making a mould to reproduce a part takes a lot of materials, sure it can be done with cheaper materials but point I'm trying to make is in my case, you can only buy as little as one square meter of carbon, or one liter of resin. They don't come in smaller quantities so that has to be bought whether you taking the modified carbon skinning method I did or produce a mould/part then do the skinning. If you're going to use the UV stabilized resin which I did to make the covers last it makes for VERY expensive moulds and plugs, not feesable.

Problem you have here is best way to have less filling and sanding work is to start with a perfect plug, which is a luxury I did not have as the frame was already buggered. A perfect plug would enable to ,with proper work, produce a perfect mould, only way to have a near perfect (only if you really lucky I should add) cosmetic finish which is what we're after with the carbon, it is after all a cosmetic thing and nothing structural or functional.

Issue is you can not fill the end products with something like a filler/primer and then flat it down to produce an easily polished surface. You only have the option of laying on more and more resin, which fills very slowly unfortunately. Too much resin and you produce runs and buildup around the edges, more stuff to sand down before you can do the next fill. Because our issue is cosmetic you need to use a very heavy carbon otherwise you see right through it, as you can see from the one picture this makes the cloth quite bumpy. Couple that with it getting around the very very awkward shape the frame is and you got a fairly bumpy rough surface to finish to a glass surface. Lotsa fun!

:P


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