Hi all... I've not frequented these pages for a while now, however I have been busy.

The GTT is on hold in part as I have been pretty much redesigning the Noble that I bought to play around in, I redesigned the dash, chopped the chasis up at the rear and designed a new single turbo engine package.... its good R&D for when I can drop back onto the GTT that is still very much alive

However I thought you guys would be interested in the rear bodywork... basically I bought another rear end then modified it extensively, I tried to do this in epoxy but decided it would crack when painted so I bit the bullit and decided to take moulds and pull a full carbon rear end.

the Untrimmed clip that I made weighed a whopping 8.5kgs, I ended up over 15kgs lighter than the original epoxy body.

Made a buck for the shape


Put boundaries for release lines






Gel coated


Tooling bulk coat which is very resin rich and has zero shrinkage, i call this the custard layer


Many release lines were needed for complex areas




Final mould




Layed dry carbon into the mould






Peal ply was layed over the carbon


A layer of flow mesh was added on top of the peel ply and the Part was then bagged up and put under a vacume, resin was then sucked through


Final part being released from the mould






Made a mould and then pulled some inner panels using the same method in a composite of carbon kevlar for strength and impact resistance.



Fitted on car





There is a lot about the process that I have not gone into detail about above, but I wanted to share that proper vacume formed lightweight yet extremely strong carbon fibre is possible even in your garden shed

Looks good! got any pics of the rest of the modifications your done?

I cant beleive you went to all that trouble and kept the mundano rear lights!

All kinds of impressed, looking good!

Does indeed look very good! Very neat trick with the little break out mould sections where you have negative details, that had not occurred to me.

Can you tell what thickness the mould is, plus what layup you used to achive that?

On my project I keep thinking "I'm only going to do this once, so I'll make sure these moulds are solid" and then I think
"this might be overkill", so tying to get a feel for what others do.

Cheers

Fred W B


[Edited on 11/10/12 by Fred W B]

You make it look so easy though I know it's really not.
Impressive work.

You have obviously done this before - super impressive! More details on your mould would be good as above.

Nope never done it before, I read up online on how to do it and other than a test peice I did a week earlier this was my first attempt.... It wasn't easy at all, but it's achievable and possible to anyone who really wants to try.

My mould is about 10mm thick, maybe more in places, it's a vinylester system and is very rigid, the large returns fact it's a tooling system give it the strength.

The part itself is actually a carbon composite, I added a material called soric which is a bit like a sandwhich foam core which adds incredible ridigity to the part with less weight than a pure carbon layup and means it has a little impact resistance to avoid star crazing.... Ironically I did a load of test layups after making this clip to see what the best layup was for strength and weight and the one I used was by far the best lol

Btw I thought long and hard about the rear lights but fact is when they are tinted ( as my other set are) I really like them.

I decided to do the doors in carbon as well... made inner and outer moulds then bonded the 2 carbon parts together...all the panels were reinforced with kevlar to give some additional crash protection over the standard car and I still saves 30% off of each door.

of cause the main reason I did it wasnt weight but so I could open the doors and the laquered carbon would be visable

As a guide I estimate material cost of the moulds and carbon itself was around 500gbp per door max, possibly less.... of cuase there was many many hours involved.. but thats half the fun















[Edited on 26/3/13 by andygtt]

good work and attention to detail

what did you use to provide the vacuum? some kind of vac pump I assume? given that I assume you used epoxy for the resin for the part (as opposed to moulds), it tends to take a while to cure compared to polyester, a decent vac source would be needed?

Your only a few panels away from having a set for a replica