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146: From Home Builds to Hypercars: Composites for Everyone
146: From Home Builds to Hypercars: Composites for Everyone
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About this episode
Exploring the fascinating world of composites, this episode features Gabe from Common Fibers, who demystifies the use of materials like carbon fiber and Kevlar in automotive applications. Listeners will learn about the processes involved in building lightweight, high-performance components, including the intricacies of mold making and resin infusion. Gabe shares insights from his work on the SSC North America Tuatara hypercar, discussing the challenges and innovations in composite manufacturing. The conversation also touches on the future of composites in the automotive industry and the importance of making these technologies accessible to enthusiasts.
Topics:
composite materials
carbon fiber
resin infusion
mold making
hypercar manufacturing
SSC North America Tuatara
design for manufacturability
pre-preg composites
vacuum bagging
DIY composites
Composites might seem like the secret language of aerospace engineers and hypercar builders, but Gabriel Mountjoy from Common Fibers is here to break down those barriers. He’s out to prove that composites aren’t just exotic materials—you can use them to elevate your own builds too.
👉 Use the code ‘PODCAST500’ to get $500 OFF HPA's VIP Package: https://hpcdmy.co/podvip
In this episode of Tuned In, Gabe shares his journey from a mechanical engineering student passionate about automotive efficiency to a successful entrepreneur in the composites industry. Alongside his now-wife Ann, he co-invented the first carbon fiber hinge, and today their company is not only one of America’s leading composite manufacturers but also uniquely committed to educating people on how to work with these materials.
We explore the evolution of composites in automotive applications, the challenges and opportunities they bring, and why designing for manufacturability is key. Gabe also takes us inside high-profile projects like SSC North America’s Tuatara—a hypercar capable of 300 mph—explaining how they construct mission-critical, complex components such as its carbon-fiber monocoque.
Gabe breaks down the essentials of material and resin selection, unpacks layup methods, and clarifies the differences between wet layup, vacuum bagging, and resin infusion. He highlights the advantages of prepreg materials and compares autoclave with out-of-autoclave approaches.
Despite producing some of the most intricate composite parts in the U.S., Gabe and his team remain refreshingly open about their processes and deeply passionate about making composites more accessible.
👉 Use the code ‘PODCAST500’ to get $500 OFF HPA's VIP Package: https://hpcdmy.co/podvip
Follow Gabe here:
Instagram: Commonfibers
Facebook: Common Fibers
YouTube: Common Fibers
WWW: commonfibers.com
Timestamps:
0:00 From Home Builds to Hypercars: Composites for Everyone
4:37 Did the passion for cars come first or carbon fiber?
7:54 How do you become a composites engineer?
10:01 What’s your work history prior to starting Common Fibers?
11:18 Are composites much more common in other industries?
14:55 What does Common Fiber’s look like today?
16:11 How are you finding composite technicians?
18:06 Why did you open a second facility?
19:01 Can you briefly explain the different resin types?
21:30 What has been the process of growing a business to have 40 staff?
26:33 How much work are you doing for the aerospace industry?
29:22 What is the SSC North America Tuatara?
30:38 How did you get involved in the hyper car project?
32:30 How does the design and production work with the Tutara parts?
38:01 What’s the benefits of the monocoque over a conventional chassis?
44:11 When we talk about composites, what are the different materials?
47:23 What are the different types of carbon fibre?
49:18 What is carbon's best strength quality?
51:56 How do you validate the strength of your parts?
57:28 What is the process of designing and manufacturing a mold?
1:06:13 How do we layup the carbon or fiber glass into our mold?
1:14:47 What is a wet layup and where would we use it?
1:18:25 What is vacuum bagging?
1:23:02 What is resin infusion?
1:28:43 What is prepreg?
1:38:25 Final 3 questions
Filter:
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Technical
Too Afraid to Ask
Car
Oldsmobile Intrigue
"...more common. I think there's a lot of mystery and intrigue around working with composites, particularly when..."
Car
Honda Civic
"...point where you can build just your regular Honda Civic with lighter weight composite parts"
Car
Ford Bronco
"... want you to tool up this project for this custom Bronco and build a bunch of these"
Car
Toyota A90
"the fibers do not want to bend to a 90 degree radius so if we had it our way everyone would put a half inch radius"
From Home Builds to Hypercars: Composites for Everyone
Did the passion for cars come first or carbon fiber?
How do you become a composites engineer?
What’s your work history prior to starting Common Fibers?
Are composites much more common in other industries?
What does Common Fiber’s look like today?
How are you finding composite technicians?
Why did you open a second facility?
Can you briefly explain the different resin types?
What has been the process of growing a business to have 40 staff?
How much work are you doing for the aerospace industry?
What is the SSC North America Tuatara?
How did you get involved in the hyper car project?
How does the design and production work with the Tutara parts?
What’s the benefits of the monocoque over a conventional chassis?
When we talk about composites, what are the different materials?
What are the different types of carbon fibre?
What is carbon's best strength quality?
How do you validate the strength of your parts?
What is the process of designing and manufacturing a mold?
How do we layup the carbon or fiber glass into our mold?
What is a wet layup and where would we use it?
What is vacuum bagging?
What is resin infusion?
What is prepreg?
Final 3 questions
Select text to request an explanation
I mean, this chassis, when we're done with it, two people can pick it up.
Wow.
So, yeah, 250 pounds, I think, when we've got it fully loaded with all of its metal hardware
inserts as well.
But it is all very well-specked out in terms of what those laminate thicknesses are, because
it really is the entire safety mechanism of this car going 300 miles per hour.
Welcome to the HPA Tune In podcast, I'm Andru your host and in this episode we're joined
by Gabe from Composite Specialist Company Common Fibers.
The idea of Common Fibers was to make composite work exactly what it says, more common.
I think there's a lot of mystery and intrigue around working with composites, particularly
when we're talking about more specialist composites like Carbon Fibre and Kevlar.
And a lot of enthusiasts think that working with these materials is essentially be
on their capability.
And Gabe is here to show us that actually it's not impossible.
He first came across my radar because I started getting served up some amazing
reels on Instagram, particularly their resin infusion reels.
But they're really educational, the content that they're putting out there.
And even just by watching all of their reels, you're going to get a really
good idea of what goes into designing and making a mold, for example,
how to lay up that mold and how to go about resin infusion.
Obviously there's a lot more to it and that's what this particular interview is about.
We talked to Gabe about what composites are, what the materials that go into a composite
construction project actually entail.
You'll find out that it's actually not necessarily an expensive process,
particularly if we're looking at the low hanging fruit of something like a
wet layout.
That being said, you're not going to see wet layouts being used at the top
levels of professional motorsport.
And Common Fibers is involved in the SSC North America Tuatara hypercar project.
Now that's a mouthful, we'll dive into what exactly that entails inside of the episode.
But essentially a full carbon fibre monocoque with full carbon fibre bodywork
and Common Fibers has been instrumental in the design and construction
of all of those parts.
We'll also dive into the process of mold making or passion making.
We're also involved with the design of these patterns and what considerations
are necessary to make sure that you can actually pull apart from the finished
pattern.
We'll also dive into some of the more high level concepts when it comes to
composite manufacturing such as the design and construction of the Tuatara
monocoque as well as how to work with pre preg carbon fibre, what that
term even means, and the difference between conventional pre preg that needs
to be cured in an autoclave and the more recent out of autoclave cure pre pregs.
Before we jump into our chat, for those who are new to the TuneIn podcast,
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Alright enough with our introduction, let's get into our interview now.
Alright welcome to the podcast game, thanks for joining us today.
Like always, we're gonna start by finding out a little bit about your background
and particularly with what you're doing in the industry with carbon fire room.
Interested, did the passion for cars come first or did the passion for
composites lead you into cars?
Good question, thanks for having me.
It was an interesting start, I went to college mechanical engineering
specifically with the desire to get into automotive efficiency engineering.
So I went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in California
because they had one of the best hyper mileage car clubs.
So they're building little cars, you could hardly call them cars, they weighed 70 pounds
but we're getting 3,000 miles per gallon.
Yeah okay, that's hyper mileage for sure.
Why are we not seeing these on the dealership floor?
Obviously 70 pounds is gonna be pretty limiting.
Pretty limited, the driver weighs more than the car typically
that's a little low to the ground.
But that was what really got me interested in composites and automotive.
I really went in, I did, I thought I would get into engine design
and it's like how can we make cars more efficient?
I was learning about diesel cycles versus petrol cycles
and hydrogen versus electricity and all these different energy sources
for how can we make cars more efficient.
But really it was pretty quick and early on in my schooling that it was,
if we just made these cars lighter, they could be so much more efficient,
so much easier.
Sure.
And so that really just took me down the rabbit hole of composites.
Okay, I don't want to derail this sort of a few minutes in
but I've just got to come back to this 3,000 miles per gallon
not knowing anything about these hyper mileage competitions.
What is the power source here?
Are we talking internal combustion?
Are we talking solar, slash electric?
Or yeah, how does it work?
Yeah, we're talking, I mean they have a bunch of different versions now
but when I was in school it was just petrol, gasoline, a little Honda
four stroke generator engine that we modified heavily,
added fuel injection to it
and we're getting as much as we possibly could get out of it
and the gas tank, just to be aware, the gas tank was a shot glass,
30 milliliters, because that was all we needed to do
the circuit which was 10 miles or something.
A shot glass, okay.
A shot glass.
Wow.
Alright, we could probably dive into that in a lot more detail
but we're here to talk composites so we'll stay mostly on task.
Alright, so you're starting to go down this rabbit hole of composites
obviously understanding that adding lightness improves just about
every aspect of how the car performs.
How did that sort of continue for you?
Yeah, I was a mechanical engineering and I actually met my now wife
in college in materials engineering
so it was the two of us who started this business
and she had a background in composites via boat building with her family
but the two of us share a similar passion of automotive manufacturing
and efficiency so the two of us ended up working on this team together
and developing composite products together
and we lived and breathed it basically
trying not to breathe the dust too much but...
Living and breathing carefully.
Yes.
In terms of learning how to work with composites
it sounds like your wife was sort of doing something in college there
but what is the formal qualification path to become,
I don't know, a composites engineer?
What do you call the job?
Yeah, I mean there's definitely a composites engineer
versus composites technician.
We definitely went the engineering route
where we both have degrees in engineering, mechanical materials,
chemical engineering.
My wife went then worked at Boeing and got a masters as well
in composite materials engineering
so that is definitely the route if you want to get a little more technical
and actually doing the FEA analysis on strengths and structures
and what the resin matrix is actually doing at a molecular level
all that sort of stuff so that was where our backgrounds began
the reality is we use a small fraction of that original knowledge
that we had in our day to day
because it is so heavy in just manufacturing and building
which you can pick up in the technical side of it
through a technical school or on the job training.
I guess from my sort of perspective from the outside looking
and you probably don't need to have a mechanical engineering degree
or understand the molecular level of the composites you're working with
to construct a carbon fiber panel for your car.
However, when you're starting to get down to the more complex
and mission critical tasks like a carbon fiber monocoque
or perhaps carbon fiber suspension components
I would say that the tables are flipped on that sort of aspect
would that be correct?
Yeah, you definitely want to understand the math
and a little bit more of the physics when you're at that level
but you absolutely can be building composites
with no level of experience or education.
And suffice to say probably most enthusiasts who are thinking
listening to this, maybe thinking they might design a composite part
for their car, probably the carbon fiber monocoque
is not going to be the first place.
It's not the low hanging fruit of the composites world.
Believe not.
We'll talk a little bit more about carbon fiber monocoques
as we get going.
Alright, bring us up to speed.
So post college, you mentioned your wife's working for Boeing.
What's your sort of work trajectory look like
prior to starting your business?
Yeah, I mean, we were fortunate enough to be one of those
startups in our college garage
where we came up with a
novel manufacturing process for composites, actually
inventing a carbon fiber hinge.
It's just through the different processes we were playing with
for building these cars and other projects.
We invented a carbon fiber hinge and patented it
and won some seed money at some competitions
and then actually took it to Kickstarter.
And truthfully, we are a successful Kickstarter company
in that we launched selling carbon fiber wallets with a hinge
selling 3,000 of them in a month
and making enough money to 13 years ago
I haven't looked back and had another job.
Amazing. So really straight out of college
didn't have to go work for anyone else.
Correct, yeah. I did my internships,
worked for some big businesses,
doing your standard mechanical engineering stuff.
Definitely wasn't the right fit for me the way I worked.
So I was very happy to be able to have the opportunity
to jump right into starting our own business right then and there.
Yeah, no doubt.
I think most enthusiasts into the car industry
kind of look with a very narrow focus lens
at how composites work in the world.
But I'm going to guess that their use is much more
common in the aerospace industry
and as you mentioned as well, boat building
than it is in cars. Is that correct?
I would say traditionally it has been correct.
That is aerospace definitely was the start of it
or even like you said fiberglass and boats
have been getting built for 100 years now
with those materials nearly.
So marine and aerospace but automotive
has definitely taken over significantly
and it's actually the market that we focused on
initially just because it was under service
that so many people were building for these other industries
but the automotive I'd say has been pushing the hardest
to grow it over the last 10 years.
And so that is where we say about 75% of our work
is automotive based at this point.
Okay. Now I'm not sort of trying to get too far ahead
of ourselves but just as you mentioned
that it was under resourced in the automotive industry
you saw a gap there.
I believe there is a drive now
I think it's in Europe to actually
ban the use of carbon fiber.
I'm not sure if it's all composites
in the construction of vehicles.
I think that's going to be a huge problem
for a lot of the supercar and hypercar manufacturers.
How much of a risk is that?
Of them actually eliminating it.
Yeah.
I think it's a bit of a long path
for them to do to actually get that.
There are so many benefits to the material.
I know I recognize the safety issues
with the catastrophic failure of composites
which I believe is what they're trying to address
and the environmental concerns
relating to its production.
But I believe from my industry perspective
that that won't come to pass.
At least I hope not.
Yeah. I think it would be a real shame
if we stopped seeing carbon fiber
hypercars out there in the market.
I'm probably never going to afford one
but it's still nice to look at anyway.
Yeah. And the reality is that these materials
are starting to get used on cars
anymore and that's what originally
got me into this is recognizing
that you can develop these materials
and get the costs down
to a point where you can build
just your regular Honda Civic
with lighter weight composite parts
and be competitive to metals.
Yeah. I think a big part
of why we've recently
sort of developed our own composites
courses or it's an ongoing
work in progress anyway.
But I think for the average home enthusiast
particularly if you're looking, we'll talk
more about these different methods as we go
but if you're looking at the low-hanging
fruit of composites such as a wet
layup where maybe strength
and weight aren't absolutely
essential but these are
techniques and materials,
consumables that are actually
relatively affordable and
you don't have to be a rocket scientist
with a mechanical engineering degree
in order to let's say make a fiberglass
hood for your car, correct?
Absolutely. And the reality is the tooling
cost is significantly less as well
like you have to make a mold for that hood
but to make a mold
for making a carbon part is way less
costly than something about thinking about stamping
a metal hood. That tooling is
immensely expensive so it really
is actually great for prototyping
and building at a lower
cost your first articles
and we've done that before where it's
a car company that plans to stamp
these out of metal will make them out of fiberglass
or carbon first because that tooling
is significantly less costly.
Yeah, makes sense.
Let's come back a step, talking about
the business and maybe bring us up to
speed with where you are today
so size and location for
a start. Absolutely.
Yeah, we've grown basically
via bootstrapping it for the last
13 years, pretty naturally
getting growing from one space to the next.
We now operate out
of two locations actually.
We've got our main facility in Seattle,
Washington with about 30 employees
and a secondary location
that we just opened up last year
in basically Bend, Oregon
with another eight employees.
So yeah, around about a combined
total of 40,000 square feet
and 40 employees.
That's a fairly sizeable operation.
In terms of the breakdown of
roles within those 40 employees
could you give us a rough idea
of who's actually
physically making components
versus design, et cetera.
How's it all work? Yeah.
Or it really is
mostly composite technicians, so
about 30 people, I'd say are
composite technicians building the parts
every day. We've got an engineering
team of about five plus myself
and my wife do engineering as well
and then round it out with
marketing and admin managers
and such. Okay.
Just interested with the composite technicians
but how are you finding
these people? Are they
coming from aerospace and boat
building industries with prior
experience or are you
bringing people in and training them in house
to your own standards? Yeah,
a mix of the two. I would say
for a long time we were bringing people in
that we weren't having a good success
at finding people in the industry
so we're bringing a lot of people and training them up
so we've got a lot of people that we've trained
over the last 10 years
and a lot of the technicians that started with zero
knowledge, I would say more recently
we've been able to hire
and find people that are coming out of
roles at General Atomics and other
aerospace industries
where what we're doing is a little more exciting
than what they were doing and they love
the work they can do here now with us
but they do come with a great background
level of experience.
What I guess would be the challenges
for a composite technician
that's come out of aerospace
or boatbuilding for that matter
and then transitioning their skills and knowledge
into the automotive space
where are the challenges for them?
There's different processes
and different standards
and expectations. I would say
boats have a lower
expectation and then maybe automotive
and aerospace up at the top of that
and so it is sort of honing in
what's good enough, what are the
expectations for
how well that weave is laid
and it's so much
is going to come down to whether it's a structural part
which often those aerospace people are coming
with a knowledge of how to make structural
composites but they don't
necessarily know how to make cosmetic composites.
Very different skills.
Very different skills and automotive
at this point they very much
focus and push for a lot of aesthetics
cosmetic parts
being almost more important than the structural
side of it on half
there are more of the parts we build.
Coming back
you mentioned you've got the two facilities
the second facility, what was the driver behind
that? Obviously I think you said
five stuff at that one, a smaller operation
than your main base?
Yes, we sort of merged and took over
a business that was already operating
composites business
we brought on a new owner
basically merged in with us at the time
and that business was doing
a slightly different version of composites
they were still resin
infusion but they are primarily vinyl ester
resin infusion parts
which they were primarily using
for
RV market
manufacturing but we were bringing on
a new customer in the
sort of aerospace industry
or small aircraft industry that wanted to
utilize that process and so
was a move for us to bring on
folks that were already well versed in that
process to help us get that
production line up and running.
Not again trying to get too far ahead of ourselves
but you've just mentioned vinyl ester
as the resin so
can you talk to us broadly
about the resins
and the different types and why
it wanted to be more suitable, why are
these people using vinyl ester for example?
Absolutely, yeah
there's so many different types
the ones that we mostly
hear about are epoxy, vinyl ester
and polyester, the three most common
but I mean we're testing new stuff
that's a sun resin
that cures with UV and doesn't
actually have a second part to it now.
Many different types but
epoxy is what you're going to use in your standard
most structural
least shrinkage, highest
typical properties expected out of it
however there are caveats to that
that something like a vinyl
ester resin, you can get that
that can run to 300 degrees fahrenheit
as its service temperature
versus epoxy's are typically going to be closer
to 200 unless you step it up
and get into a high temp resin
which costs a lot more
so in terms of cost it's epoxy
at the top, vinyl ester and then polyester
at the bottom and that polyester
is going to be the cheapest
not going to have his bets, shrink more
it's going to have more heat deflection
issues and so again
great for boats that are
maintaining pretty cool temperatures
not so good for cars maybe
yeah not great for cars
okay so you mentioned that
vinyl ester there comes down
below epoxy in terms of price point
yet it's got a higher ability
to withstand temperature
that to me would be a positive in some applications
what are some of the negatives
is it sort of epoxy
provides a higher strength
yeah a lot of it
there's going to be a higher strength to it
visually there's going to be differences
epoxy you can get very much
optically clear versus the vinyl ester
and polyesters are almost always going to have
a brownish tinge to it
not great for your aesthetic components
if you want to leave the component
clear, unpainted or not
wrapped for example
exactly but yeah
they have different mechanical properties
when we're specking out a new project
we definitely look at which one we're going to use
for it different
adhesion abilities
when you're talking in mold coatings
so gel coats or in mold clears
and quartz
epoxy actually is harder to bond to
so there are benefits to going with that vinyl ester resin
or sometimes down to a polyester resin
alright let's get back
onto the business a few other aspects
that I wanted to touch on
in terms of you mentioned 13 years here
and it's been bootstrapped
what has been the process of growing
to obviously now a
significant and large operation with 40 staff
yeah I mean it really
has been just growing with our customers
and letting our work speak
for itself and it's one of those things
where for the first 10 years we really didn't
do any marketing or outreach
ever it was simply
we went from one project to being recommended
to the next project
and we grew naturally that we
started with custom one-off components
for race cars and people
and then worked our way into
sort of small aftermarket shops
that needed 10 of something
and then into larger aftermarket shops
so 100 of something
and then now where we are
and where we want to continue being
for the most part is in OEM manufacturing
so where we are working with
SSC North America
and electric car companies
and airplane manufacturing companies
where we're building for them the direct OEM parts
okay in terms of
marketing you obviously just mentioned
you really didn't do any and it's
grown word of mouth which is always
a nice way of doing it
obviously means that you are producing
a quality product otherwise you wouldn't be
getting that work in the first place.
You came across sort of my radar
thanks to being served up a whole bunch
of resin infusion reels on Instagram
which I'm certainly not angry about
I'm just interested how useful
is Instagram for you
as a marketing tool or is this
just sort of general awareness
I'm sort of thinking to myself
the SSC North America's
remax and conics of this world
I can imagine them sitting down scrolling
at Instagram, oh she's reached out to these guys
that's where we're going
for our next carbon fibre component
Yep, yeah you'd be surprised
we definitely started heavy
with Instagram
back when we were selling wallets
when we first made wallets
we built a 25,000
following
user following on Instagram
and then we stopped making wallets for the most part
kind of that fell off
we really touched Instagram for another 8 years
until
a couple of years ago we brought on
actually my wife's cousin
to start helping with
marketing and helping with our Instagram
and actually just to even get back
the name of our company is Common Fibers
the name of that was
the goal is to make carbon fibre more common
that was what we started out with
in college as our goal
composites industry has always been
very closed as to
hiding all these little trade secrets
and all the things that they do
and so we took a different approach
from the very beginning that we wanted to share
and show what we're doing
so you will find our Instagram showing
the exact processes of how we build our parts
Yeah I can confirm it
it's quite educational, you're definitely not
hiding anything
We're not hiding anything, we see it as a rising tide
we want the entire composites
community to grow, we want more
DIY people at home learning
these processes
that's how we're going to make composites more mainstream
specifically in automotive
industry so we've been very open
about it and what we came to is we just wanted
to show more people online
what we were doing and be more
educational on our Instagram
and in doing so
we gained 100,000 followers
in under a year and
that absolutely became part
of our marketing strategy of
I mean we were bringing on contracts
with builders that said hey I saw how you're doing
stuff here and I want you to
tool up this project for this custom Bronco
and build a bunch of these
So it is genuinely working for you?
Yeah absolutely
that we have multiple customers
that watch us on Instagram
and realize hey these guys are making quality parts
they're being truthful about it
and not trying to hide anything
Yeah well I think you've really gotten
nowhere to hide when you're putting yourself out there
in the way that you guys are on Instagram
so I mean
hats off to you doing a great job
Thank you
On the business front as well
services offered
I think we've probably broadly got an idea
but can you cement that for us?
Yeah I mean we are very
vertically integrated that has always been one of our
main goals so we have
full engineering services
3D scanning, reverse engineering
so part design
through to the tooling design side
of things as well as all of our
in-house tool manufacturing so
CNC routers, lasers
3D printers to build tools however
we need to build them and then once
those tools are created in-house we
are laying them up infusing
them or using pre-preg in an oven
and then following that up with the entire gamut
of post processing
which is basically CNC trimming
hand trimming, hand finish work
assembly and then full
automotive finish and a painting department
Okay so a one stop shop
Absolutely
And you mentioned there is still
some level of aerospace
industry support as well it's not purely
the automotive industry correct?
Yeah we have a number of
customers that are in the aerospace industry
and yeah they're
definitely good customers as well
they don't tend to be as exciting
sometimes but
Well actually now that you mentioned that
I'm just again looking from the outside in
with no specific knowledge
I would have assumed that the
big dollar contract probably would have been
in aerospace rather than automotive
A, is there any truth to that
and B, the reason that you're chasing
automotive is that more just because
as you say it's interesting and that's where your passion lies
Yeah it's definitely a mix of that
Aerospace
it does take a little more to break into
we're not officially ISO
certified but we run our business
as if we are we've got great MRP
for tracking materials and usage
and processes and QC
which have actually impressed a number of our
aerospace customers
saying that they're better than what they're using
but we don't have those certifications necessarily
and haven't needed them and again
it's just those industries are more
over-served and so
breaking into them actually takes work
versus it's been so easy and natural
to bring on automotive work
Yeah that makes perfect sense
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Alright, let's get back to the episode.
Alright, well talking about automotive
work, let's dive
into one of the projects
that I'm really interested to find out more about
and that's your work on the
SSC North America Tuatara.
For those who have absolutely no idea
what I just said, could you give us
a quick overview of what that hypercar is?
Absolutely, SSC's
North America
building the Tuatara is really
one of the best American hypercar
manufacturers
or one of few in America
and they happen to be located in Washington State
just about three hours away from us
and they are building a car
and have been pushing for the last
it's been in the works for
10 years this car or more
for setting the world record
for the fastest speed
or production car and they actually
held that record with the previous car
there's the ultimate aero quite some years ago
and they've been shooting for
300 mile per hour with this car
and they currently do have
a proved and recorded
race speed I want to say 287
or something miles per hour
which technically does beat
any of the other cars out there right now
with a two way average so
I don't think it's officially recorded in Guinness Book World Record
but I know these guys are continuing to work on
they're going to hit that 300 mark.
Okay, alright
so let's sort of start
at the start how did you get involved
with this project and how long
have you been working with them for?
Yeah, I think they probably found us on Instagram
Alright, proving me wrong yet again
They reached out to us
on our website contact form
it's probably been
about eight years ago now
and they were in a rush
for getting to a car show and needed some parts
to be wrapped in carbon fiber just for some cosmetic
pieces for a prototype car
and they needed it done probably in about a week
and we said sure
we'll do it at that point in time
we were quite a bit smaller
company probably 10 to 15
employees and 6,000 square feet
of space and
saw this very cool car company we hadn't
heard of needed some help and so
we bent over backwards
and did whatever we could to get them their parts
and build them to quality
and then basically
continued that conversation since then
you know for the next prototype car
could we help build these parts and just develop
that relationship through to the point where
it was as they were getting
through their prototyping and wanting to get into production
we had the opportunity to bid
on the contract and help them
take it to the next level
to build production tooling and launch
their product all the way
Okay, alright so
at this point what
is your involvement with
the composite work on the Toyota
how sort of deep does that all run?
Yeah, I mean we produce
every single component
that is composite on that car
which is a bill of materials of
98 parts
98, that's a lot
and that includes the monocoque chassis
as well as every body panel
every interior panel
and all high downforce
exposed wings and fins that you see on the outside
Right
How does the design
production process work
with the Toyota where I'm going with this is
is the design work
produced by SSE North America
and then you get a file
essentially here make this part
or is it a bit more
sort of interactive than that between
the two businesses?
Yeah, I mean because I would say we got
into the relationship a little late
the car was already designed by the time
we were involved right we were helping on prototype 2 for them
so primarily the design work
was done and the shape of it was figured out
the general construction
was figured out and as we
worked through those prototypes with them we were
able to start providing our feedback
into more the
design for manufacturability
DFM which is what I'd say we specialize
in as you know you can
build it that way but it's going to be very expensive
I would suggest we do it this way because
we'll be able to tool it better
you'll get a better product out of it in the end so
Could you maybe for those
who aren't really following here
design for manufacturability, I think that's something
that's really easy to overlook. The 3D modelling
world with Fusion these days
has made anyone at home
able to design just about anything
but just because you've got a model
on your screen doesn't necessarily mean
it can be produced at all
or it may be very expensive to produce
so could you give us a couple of examples
of design changes or feedback
that you initiated to
aid DFM?
For composites the most
important thing is going to be draft
angles, draft analysis to get these parts
out of molds. You can make
something with different draft angles
interlocking and dilocking
your part in that mold but that mold is going to
have to be made in multiple pieces
and the more parts you make that mold
the more complex it is, the more work it is
to build that mold to maintain tolerances
so we are constantly
pushing and encouraging customers
to get away from dialogue features
and designs and look at how
can you build this with a singular pole direction
and whether it's a singular pole
direction that gets bonded to a separate piece
after the fact so it's a post-processing
or it is how do you make that
tool in a very simple way such that
you can have a dialogue but it's going to be
removable in a more easy
manner. So
dialogue, draft analysis, that is
a huge part of it and
then just feature geometry that's acceptable
radiuses, sharp corners
are always a huge one that composes
do not like sharp corners
the fibers do not want to bend
to a 90 degree radius so
if we had it our way everyone would put a half inch radius
on everything we did. Maybe not practical
for every application though.
Not quite so. So it's always
that push and pull
for how big we can get a radius
because that's going to reduce again
all the costs are going to be reduced if you can
increase that radius size. Yeah that
makes a lot of sense. Alright I'm keen
to dive into the
carbon fiber monocoque itself, I mean
this is something that obviously hypercars now
that's kind of
the norm, it's been the norm
in sort of top level motorsport
like WEC and F1
for a long time. The process
of doing that seems again
with my lack of industry knowledge
to be
sort of very daunting, very
very complicated. The other thing
I was sort of looking at here is
obviously there's a safety aspect
pretty much with all of these components
for a car that you want to make sure
that it's fit for purpose, it's going to have the required
strength, it's not going to flex, it's not
going to end up fatiguing and failing
in a reasonable lifetime.
So the design of this monocoque
how did that come about? Sure
again a little bit
before our time with the involvement
with SSC that most of that
design was complete before we started talking
to them, we did get again our hands
in it a little bit as they proceeded
from the changes they wanted to
instill after their prototype and into the next
one. And that design
really did spawn from
the original automotive designer that was working
with them as well as
the Indy car designer, there was a chassis designer
or Indy cars
that really did the majority of the structural
analysis and design of this part
of this whole monocoque.
So you sort of can farm that out
to industry professionals who
have knowledge in
doing exactly this and then
essentially do what they tell you to do. Yep
exactly so we definitely
we try to push the onus onto our customers as much
as possible in sense of being a
build-the-spec manufacturer that we want
their engineering team to be responsible for
what those final specs are to be.
We of course will provide our experience
and knowledge and recommendations
but we do try and push as much of that
final design onto our customer
to make that call just for the
sake of liability. In the case of this
monocoque chassis
with SSC, it was very well designed
with this Indy car
designer. We've enjoyed working with him
recommending changes
and getting updates created
and pushed through the process as we
saw fit but it is all very
well specced out in terms of what those
laminate thicknesses are, where
plies need to be, which ply, thickness
uni versus twill
fabrics, where a core needs to
go, it's all specified
so that it has the torsional rigidity that it needs
to be and the rollover strength
because it really is the entire safety mechanism
of this car going 300 miles per hour.
Yeah of course.
You just brought in a bunch of technical terms
which we don't want to gloss over
we'll come back to those as we get more into
the actual composites but let's stay with this
for a little bit. Could you give us a bit
of an idea of where the benefits
are of going this carbon fibre monocoque
route over a conventional
chassis construction.
Are we talking is it
rigidity and strength or is it
weight savings or is it tick all of the above?
Yeah really all of the above
I mean this chassis
when we're done with it, two people can pick it up.
Wow.
So yeah, 250 pounds
I think when we've got it fully loaded
with all of its metal hardware inserts
as well in there so
the weight, strength and stiffness
of this chassis is
very impressive compared to
what you could get comparable to in a welded steel frame.
And then again just
being able to build in
the structure and the aesthetics
into all one piece
from a manufacturability perspective
it is so nice. If you are building purely from scratch
and you can design this monocoque
chassis for the car
you know you can build in
the seats the door like the door frame
is built into the chassis
like where your seals go
so there's so much design elements that you can build
in that you just can't do
with your traditional chassis construction.
As you're saying that though
I'm sort of thinking to myself
you'd really have to be thinking
20 steps into the future
to make sure you don't get to fitting the doors
and then ah how are we going to
sell these things. Obviously that's
the benefit of designing the entirety of the car
in the virtual world before anything's manufactured
but still
Kudos to all of the engineers involved
in getting all of those details
in. Absolutely. 15 years
in the making. You mentioned
about all of the metal hardware
and obviously the carbon fiber
monocoque at some point you're
bolting sub frames to the front to the rear
whatever that may look
like. You can't sort of
thread a bolt into
carbon fiber. How does
that work? Yeah
and so in the construction of this
monocoque chassis we have built
in steel hard points
that are all throughout the chassis at locations
So these are within the
monocoque layout? Yep. Within the monocoque
layout or post bonded to the outside
because really at the end of the day
you post bond on an insert internal
to it and then you're bolting
something to it from this side. You're
sandwiching that together around the composite
so doesn't
necessarily have to be within the laminate. It can be
post bonded outside of it. Okay
with these monocoques
how do they
fear in sort of
the unfortunate event there's an
accident and they become damaged?
Are they repairable at all
or is this sort of a one and done
throw it away and start again item? For the most
part I would say it's going to be a one and done
component. It is quite difficult
to repair
back to the same level of structural integrity
depends on of course what happened
there could be instances where
it is damaged to an area that
maybe isn't nearly as structural
but again the patch or prayer
work would probably be generally frowned
upon. I
follow a few of the automotive
YouTubers, the likes of Tavares
rebuilding
accident damaged cars. I think
it might have been Matt Armstrong
actually rebuilt a
I think it was a 720S that was
damaged and so looking at the
monocoque and I'm thinking to myself, I don't
know if I'd be too confident
trying to affect a repair on this
so just how do you know?
You can't really test it can you?
Yeah I mean I've seen, what I would recommend
what I've seen is incorporate some
steel elements into there, rebuild
in a roll cage of some sort and give yourself
some double redundancies
to be on the safe side.
For the actual construction
of the monocoque and again
we're going to get more into the details as we go through
this but if you're looking at formula
one these would be a pre-preg
carbon that's cured
in autoclave. Is that
the same route you've gone with the
Toyota? For the most part
we are using
out-of-auto-clave pre-preg
composites so it is just in a large
oven that we have at our facility
which basically nowadays
when you're looking at the variety of pre-pregs
getting made you can get within 5%
of the structural
capabilities of autoclave
versus out-of-auto-clave
and so when it came to
specking this project out the benefits
of that 5% or worth
the extra cost you do have to design
tooling differently if you're going in an autoclave
that significantly add cost
plus just the cost of operating
that autoclave. I guess
the benefit from the lights of the formula
one in IndyCar constructors is
the single seat chassis are actually
really small compared to a road-going
car right? Yeah absolutely
this is a very large monocoque chassis
and I've never
liked the misnomer
and I do always like to make sure people know
this is not made in one piece
the monocoque chassis is made in
8 pieces all bonded
together within a fixture to hold tolerances
and so
laid up all separately, trimmed
separately and then all put together.
Is the sort of
I can only assume there would be a
strength sort of hit would
take bonding components
together as opposed to making them
in one part is that the case
or how close do we get to the strength of
a one piece construction?
You'd be surprised with how strong
the structural adhesives
that we're using nowadays
when we're doing the testing when we were originally
specking the glue, the epoxy
that's holding these chassis together
you're tearing the carbon apart
before you're breaking that epoxy bond
and that's what we're looking for when we're doing
our testing for different adhesives
so essentially the
epoxy, the bond is stronger than
the base materials.
Yeah, you delaminate before you break the bond
so it makes you feel good
when you see that.
Yeah, nice to have that confidence.
And yeah, it's just impossible
for the shape that you're talking about
building that has hollow tubular sections
you just can't build it in one piece
so it has to be bonded.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I guess what we'll do now is we'll take
a step back and sort of approach this
now from a more basic approach
which is starting with
the composites themselves and
I think when most enthusiasts
hear the term composites we automatically
think of carbon fibre
and I guess that's still probably
the most common material used
but there's a wider family
of materials as well, could you sort of
enlighten us as to what is available?
Absolutely, yeah, as you said
composites is a broad definition
of utilizing multiple materials
into one, so
as we know, fibreglass
has been around for a long while
with polyester but even
concrete and trees are composites
so there's a wide range
of composites, the one
that has gotten the most hype lately
absolutely has been carbon fibre
with epoxy but yeah
concrete and rebar is the same thing
which is a matrix
and a reinforcement so a resin and a fibre
and you're combining the best
of those properties into one material
Okay, in the automotive
sense we're probably not going to be using
too much concrete and rebar so
with the materials that we have available to us
fibreglass, carbon fibre, maybe
Kevlar, Flax even
you know, what's the
use case for each of these materials
I'm guessing at your level
you're probably not whipping out fibreglass
and some chopped strand matte too often
You'd be surprised
at fibreglass I do think gets the short end of the stick
for being this lower grade material
but it absolutely has properties
that make it useful
something that
fibreglass isn't well known for
is that it's far better
at abrasion resistance like Kevlar is known for
as well as impact resistance
so carbon fibre
is quite brittle so when it fractures
it is going to break
stronger it's going to take more to do that
that we actually like to
and we get plenty of
grief about it on our Instagram
is our most common laminate
that we utilize is a 6K
a fibreglass
G flow and a 12K
a layer of carbon fibre
so that's a sandwich of carbon
fibreglass carbon
that G flow fibreglass is a flow media
that helps resin flow through the part
but it also creates a web
of fibreglass internal to the carbon
that when it takes impact
and when it gets in a collision of some sort
it's actually going to be more adorable
product in the end than just carbon
so there are tons
of applications where it makes sense to mix the materials
and that you can use
fibreglass or Kevlar to make a better product
than just carbon alone
I think I haven't heard of that
but again not that deep in the industry
interesting though just to see how you can
utilize the combination
of materials to achieve a better end result
I think I hear
of carbon and Kevlar being used
in that way for
something that's going to be impact or abrasion resistant
and you see
rally cars where they're
getting padded with gravel all of the time
Kevlar is a pretty common
product for the use of under body
protection and guard liners yes
Yeah those are all again
Kevlar is great for all that
Alright now even within
the likes of carbon fibre
as a material
also still comes in a variety
of different form factors
as well could you sort of give us some insight
into what the options are
Absolutely
yeah I mean carbon itself
comes in a very fine strand
that tends to get bundled up into toes
each of those toes
gets woven together
and into
some sort of fabric so you can have
unidirectional which is just fibres
all in one direction
is technically going to be your strongest option
most used in aerospace because you can
apply strength exactly
where you need it and you can engineer
that laminate to have strength
and tensile strength where you want it
and compressive strength where you want it
so that's the most basic but then
you start weaving it into different patterns
twill being the most common
automotive cosmetic
appearance plane weaves
if you're a Ferrari guy
but plane we was actually originally
more common in aerospace
and these weaves you're actually losing
strength every time that fiber goes
up and down so you're
you're losing your instead
of being a straight line it's now zigzagging
up and down every time it goes up and over a toe
and so you've got spread toe fabrics
which are really flat so it's less
z change and so
those are all important considerations
when you're specking out a structural
composite part as to
is it being aesthetic if you want an aesthetic top layer
but you want a structural layer
that's below and even there
you've got the different orientations
of harness, satins
and biaxial
so you're getting 45 degree
carbon in there as well.
This is much more complicated
than I would have given it
credit for and I do have a cursory knowledge
of this from our own
in-house courses so yeah interesting
in terms of the strength
which you've kind of alluded to already
you've got the different ways
a component could be
put under stress so
maybe a tensile force where it's trying to
be pulled apart or a compressive force
where you're trying to push it together
or a bending force
is there certain forces
that composites are better
at handling than others?
Yeah in general
they're going to be known for taking their tensile
forces far better than a compressive
strength that's pretty
well agreed upon.
One of the things that I think is most interesting
is when I'm looking at parts
and failure mechanisms
it's almost very rarely
strength but actually
stiffness driven.
It's easy to make a carbon part
that's going to be strong enough
you pull on it for the load that you need
and it's going to hold the strength technically
but because the carbon is so thin
it has no structural
stiffness to it
it's going to deflect and fail
because of its stiffness
and so often you have to actually take that
into consideration when designing it
that you can't just build a flat panel
you need that panel to build with ribs
to increase its cross sectional
stiffness to it because that's going to be
your failure mechanism, not the strength of it.
Yeah okay yeah that makes sense
in terms of the
strength of the different
materials that you've mentioned
uni-directional versus all of the other
options, is this
how would I put it, is this a feature
or a bug with composites
and so much as the strength is not
isotropic, the same in all directions
but then you can
choose the different types of
material and then build
strength into the direction
that you know that the component's going to be
stressed or loaded in.
Yeah so back in college
there was called, you can build something
out of composites or you can just make black aluminum
and black aluminum is just
piled up thick and hopefully
it's quasi isotropic by the end of it
and it's strong enough but if you're
really doing your composite design
properly, you are
utilizing the material for
its strength exactly where you need it to be
and you're going to result in far less material usage
and a lot lighter weight in
the end stronger part. So
yeah you have to have the knowledge of how to
apply that and recognize where those forces
and loads are getting carried but if you can
master that and understand it for your
design case then you will result
in a far better product.
Now this is starting to get a little bit
beyond the enthusiast level
of knowledge or
what they, our listeners could generally
apply but at your level
how, obviously you mentioned a lot of the stuff
your monocoque was dealt with
exterior designers and then you just
do what you're told, that's fine. But if you're
designing a component, sounds like
you're doing plenty of that as well, how
are you kind of estimating the
forces that you are going to need to support
and then designing the component
and validating that it's going to be fit
for purpose before a part leaves
the workshop. Absolutely.
I would say typically forces are provided to us
by a customer, they know the loads that
they're expecting and then we'll be taking those loads
and running through some scenarios to
determine okay what do we need to build this
laminate to be. And the reality is
we try to keep it as simple as possible.
You can use FEA analysis
to get yourself pretty far. Those
softwares have absolutely gotten far
better over the years.
I definitely did a lot of it in college
and it had its bugs and issues and back
then my professors
very much recommended you can
do a lot of the calculations with simple
beam calculators that take into
account all the different laminates so you can
build up yourself your laminate
and apply as if it were
a simple beam. And so that is
truly where I try to push and start
with our analysis is simplify
it as much as you can do a beam
scenario. Come up with
an estimate laminate and then build
and test is going to be the best
way to go about it. If you can
and have the budget for it FEA analysis is going to be
great for validating but
at the end of the day composites
so much of the strength also comes down
to how it's built the manufacturing process
if you got air into it if it was baked
at the right temperature the cure cycle
was correct. That's all going
to affect the strength of it and so you really
do need to practice and build the thing
and test it you know Boeing still
builds their wings for the 787
and bends and make sure that
those are actually built correctly
because it's just not as simple
as milling a homogenous block of aluminum
and knowing you have the same results every time.
Yeah, yeah and
that respect you know what
sort of a safety factor would
you typically build into a component?
Definitely depends on
the part you know
a lot of what we build is your basic arrow components
which is going to be a fender
or a hood
or a wing or something that really at the end of the day
is not mission critical.
Yeah, mission critical so far less
of a design factor
a safety factor there versus a monocoque chassis
where yeah you might want to
be more in that 2x range
versus the 1.5x range for something
simpler. Sure.
In terms of kind of the life
of the composite component
are these you know assuming that
they're going to be able to handle
one time the forces that are going
to be exerted on them
does that mean that they are going to live
forever or is there a fatigue life
associated with them as well?
Basically you cycle this part
I don't know 10,000 or 100,000 times
and it will cycle to failure.
So that is one of the perks and benefits
of composites is that it has a far
better fatigue life
compared to steel or aluminum
or your classic metals.
So I couldn't tell you the exact number
and again it's going to be application based
but composites are going to be able
to handle those cycles a lot better.
I mean one of the things that I
have the most experience in that is
the carbon fiber hinge that we built
and designed.
We did a lot of testing on it
and tested how many times can you open
and close this hinge because we wanted to
not just apply it to wallets
and so we did testing
and cycled our hinges through 10,000 cycles
and found an 8% reduction
in strength after 10,000 cycles.
Something you really wouldn't have seen
with other materials.
So quite impressive
on the fatigue side of things.
In terms of testing
a composite component
is there any non-destructive
testing that can be completed
to gain
some confidence
and be sort of
an understanding of the
lifespan that the part could
live with. I guess this comes into
more
if you're buying, maybe
you've just bought an old Formula 1 car
with carbon fiber wishbones
it'd be nice to know that
they're not fatigued about to fail the first time
you're taking on track.
There is non-destructive testing
very much utilized
in the aerospace industry
basically X-raying your parts
to look for delamination
or errors
within the laminate, but of course
it's hidden inside there.
So visually you cannot see it
so outside of actually
X-raying for inspection
carbon fiber is actually X-ray transparent
so it's actually utilized for
various medical purposes as well
tables for X-ray machines
because it doesn't interfere
you won't visually see it
with the X-ray effects in it
with that X-ray process
but truthfully the one I'd recommend
to the DIY person
who just bought a bike frame
or is inspecting something is the tap test
of using a quarter
and tapping along it
you are going to hear if there's delaminations
or voids it's going to sound
it should have a nice sort of
tinny ceramic sound to it
but if it doles out and thuds
you've got some sort of air in there
to make sure you're still good.
That sounds like a much cheaper
technique than X-raying as well
maybe Ocean Gate should have given that a crack.
Yep, absolutely.
Alright let's move
into another key aspect
with making composite components
such as the mold or pattern
whatever you like to call it
that the composite is going to be
basically laid up on
these obviously come
in an infinite range
of shapes sizes and designs
can you maybe talk us through
the process of designing and manufacturing
a typical mold
if there's such a thing as a typical mold?
Yeah, absolutely.
When it comes to our design process
it definitely comes down to
understanding first what are the material
or what's the requirements
for that particular product
is it something we're building
10 times, 100 times, 1000 times
and what is the complexity of it
I'd say those are sort of the three variables
they're going to help us determine
what tooling route we're going to go
I would say our most common tooling
production method that we utilize
for which we're doing for large
scale parts again a hood
or a fender or some sort of part of your car
that milling out of solid aluminum
or in canal or steel
would be extremely costly
is we're going to be milling a foam plug
a master plug
out of a high density foam
putting it in primer, sanding it, polishing it
and then pulling a fiberglass
or composite mold off the top of it
that's going to cover the majority
of the automotive work that we do
So just to clear that up as well
for those who aren't quite following
so in order to make something like a carbon fiber hood
you first of all have to
make a pattern which is essentially
the hood
then you'll make a mold
be it fiberglass or carbon fiber of that
so it's essentially a negative
part you want to produce
and then you lay up your final part
into that new fiberglass or composite mold
have I got that about right?
Yep, that's all correct
and that's if you're starting from CAD
and you're milling yourself a plug
but we've made hundreds of molds
where you're just splash molding off
of an existing part
and then you might just make modifications to
that mold if you're trying to come up with something custom
or you can hand shape it out of a block of foam
or clay or a 3D print
there's lots of different ways to get to that pattern
that don't require a CNC mill
in the first place
So your CNC
mill router
are the terms we're using interchangeably here?
Yeah
you can use them interchangeably
What's the
size of that?
What size of component could you actually
mill?
On our largest machine
we can do a 10 foot long
5 foot wide by 3 foot tall
block of foam technically
and that's with a 5 axis router
so that can come in from all angles
I would not recommend ever starting
with that large of a block of foam
there's far smarter and less costly ways
to do that
but yeah we can build a pretty large segment of a car
all in one go on that machine
What about
MDF is that another product you'd use
to make a mold or a plug?
Yeah so
in that production method
you're building a plug
and then you're splashing a mold off of it
Those 5 glass tools
we typically quote and say they're good for
500 parts at the very least
reality is they'll take some rework
a little refinishing
you can get one of those molds to make you a thousand parts
but when you're talking
higher detail
in terms of the
the fineness of the features, the radiuses
especially multi component molds
that is where you do want to start considering
going into milled billet aluminum
or steel
to be able to
build to higher tolerances
as well as
I don't know it's in terms of how
you can construct those molds
it's a whole lot easier to build multi component molds
when they're milled in
billet. Yeah I can imagine the tolerances
would be a lot more accurate
Yeah we like to say that
with a foam plug
you're spraying primer and sanding on
plus or minus 30 thousandths
sort of your tolerance in inches
but of course going to billet you're now
five thousandths or whatever
I guess the billet lasts essentially
forever as well
and the billet can essentially last forever
you're far less likely to
you know aluminum is going to wear
on you it's going to scratch more easily
and you do need to consider again
the tolerance of the part you're building at the end of the day as well
for aerospace
as well as the material off near the material
incanel being thrown around
which has a coefficient
of thermal expansion at CTE
is very minimal versus aluminum
expands a lot so
you put that into your oven
bake it you're going to make a part
that's larger than you anticipated
So these are all of these unintended consequences
that you really have to think about before you choose the suitable material
for the application
Exactly and you might even scale your
mold down because you know how much it's going to grow
at the temp that you're going to be cooking it at
so you end up with a part that's closer to tolerance
but yeah when you're thinking about parts
as large as
you know the pontoons that go into
the monocoque chassis that are 12 feet long that we build
that mold
if it was in aluminum I think it would grow like a half inch
so
pretty significant so that's where you
often when you're making composite parts you actually
will do a carbon fiber tool
it's going to have a matched
coefficient thermal expansion to the part you're making
and it's also very small
but if you do a fiberglass tool and you bake it
it's going to also grow so considerations
when you're speccing
this proper tool material
Can you talk a little bit more
in a little more detail about the finishing
let's just go back to
your good old high density foam plug
so what is the process of
finishing that prior to
actually making a mold off it
Yeah you will always
almost always see super highly
polished molds as being
you know you've sanded that primer
and blocked it where you want it to be
and then you've sanded from 180 grit all the way to
1000 grit and polished it
I think
and we have found you don't need to do that
that's great for if you're making a
a boat hole and you want it
to spray it with gel coat you want it to come out nice and glossy
and you're done with it you don't have to paint it
but so much of the automotive parts we build
the parts are going to go through
they're going to be made and then they're going to be
post coated with an automotive clear coat
and so there actually
is no need to make that
surface really shiny and then have to
scuff that surface back down
to paint on it
You're almost going backwards a step
Exactly so something we changed years ago
is why are we polishing all these
molds when we can just
make them finish them at 400 grit
your part comes out closer to what the
finish needs to be anyways and it's less work
to prep it for paint so
don't beat yourself up on trying to get the most shiny
lustry mold finish
because you think it's going to stick the part
the mold releases that they have
these days they can release from anything
basically right so it's not going to
it's not going to key into the mold just because
you're at 400 grit versus a thousand
or higher yeah exactly
let's talk a little bit
about exactly that mold release
and there's a bit of a
hint in the name but can you
talk about what the options are
and how these mold release agents actually work
yeah you know traditionally
you would hear of wax as people are
putting wax onto their molds
the latest what most people are using now
is called a semi permanent release
and that's basically a ceramic
coating now that is a just
in a chemical we wipe it on
and wipe it off and it's not waxy
or pasty and that
forms a perfect film across your
mold that is extremely slippery
problem is it can be too slippery
actually so we will typically
season our molds with
the recommended four coats
sealer plus release of a semi permanent
and they'll actually finish it with one
to two coats of your more traditional
wax
cause you want it to actually stick a little bit
if you're spraying in mold coatings
if you try and spray an in mold coating on a
perfectly wax surface it just beads up
you can imagine water in your car
it's impossible to paint it
so you actually need that mold to have
a little stick to it so
we'll use a TR wax
or a Pardal paste wax
just for finishing it to get
actually a little stick back to the mold
so sticky but not too sticky
exactly got it
and I can imagine that if you find
out at the end when it's time to
take the part out of the mold that it
was too sticky that's going to be
a big old mess that's a
painful process yes hard to come back
from you definitely want to make sure
that you've got those molds well released
I want to talk
about some of the more
complex layout processes
if we're making a
relatively simple panel
maybe it's a carbon fibre
guard fender or a door panel
that's got some shape to it
but there's nothing too intricate
I can imagine that could be laid
up pretty easily with a full
sheet of carbon when you're starting
to get into very complex
three-dimensional shapes
you can't just drape a big sheet of carbon
across that mold and hope for the best
can you generally not
it depends
mostly depends on what your tolerance
for aesthetics are in terms of bunching
and weave distortion what's allowable
there because you often can
push and form and shape and get
that part that material to fit in there
if you've got sharp box corners
you're going to have to cut into there
and make some folds and if you're okay
with those that are not super clean
you can absolutely just put a full sheet
in and make it work I guess that's
fine if there's going to be
is it going to be a painted or wrapped
part in the end but if you want
a finished carbon look
with a clear coat that's not going to
fly is it not going to fly so
there's a number of ways to work around that
if you're working from CAD in the
first place you know we have
one of our engineers is almost
entirely doing carbon patterning
is utilizing software to
you know flatten complex
geometry surfaces and
make them into patterns that we
CNC cut on our kitting machine
that lay in and form really nicely to those
shapes so that's
that's the way you can do it if you have all the
equipment set up for it
to build a great pattern and get yourself the
seams right we want them to be if you don't
have that there are workarounds
to doing it you know we've been
building parts far longer than we had a
lot so we didn't always have that option
you can hand kit create your own patterns
you know a trick that I recommend
for people on complex geometry is
take some just masking
tape tape the entire area
off peel it off it's going to hold the shape
and then you can come in and cut slits into
it and you can flatten that pattern out
with some masking tape
set that back down onto your carbon and now
cut out your carbon into the final
shape that you want with nice seam lines
on it so you can
flatten a surface other techniques
you know putting down
pieces in areas that are complex and then
rolling the edges back to make a rolled
edge so you can end up with a nice tight
seam there and then back it with your next
ply that goes over it
so there's lots of little tricks to fill
in certain areas cosmetically
and then back it with the simple layer
afterwards alternatively
it's making sure you can
you can like use some spray adhesive
or a veil to maintain your material
and then cut a straight line into it
you jump the gun on that one
that was the next thing I was going to get to
cos even with my sort of
meager level of composite work I've done
cutting carbon fibre and not ending
up with frayed edges and keeping
the weave exactly how it was
on the roll that's tricky
so can you just elaborate on what you just mentioned
there so how do we deal with that
absolutely and we're always trying different
methods because it is difficult
it's not the easiest thing to maintain
edges and not have them frayed
different people do different techniques
but there's veil which is like a
thin fiberglass or a stretchy polyester
that you can spray adhesive and stick to the back
of it so when you cut it it holds its shape
we'll use plastic films
that then have to get removed and once you've got
it located in the mold
we'll even laser cut carbon fibre
which actually sort of ever so slightly
holds those edges together
better than that of a cutting knife
that's going to fray it a little bit more
of course cuts a lot nicer
and comes up with much better seams
but if you're working with dry fibres it's definitely
one of the veins of our existences
avoiding loose fibres and frays
on the cosmetic areas
you do have to be diligent and disciplined
we do use lasers
just like you can buy a construction
laser level puts a cross
down on your part
we have it mounted up above
someone can do the lay up underneath it
and it'll show them what a good straight line is this way
you're doing a v-weave through the middle of the part
and then that's what you can reference to
to make sure you're maintaining straight lines
across your part
you kind of alluded to this a little earlier
but these lay ups
aren't going to be a single layer
and you're going to need
some kind of overlap on these complex
individual parts that you've cut out
otherwise you're not going to really have any strength
in them, isn't that fair?
Yeah, you definitely need to design that laminate
for the overlap joints
if you can, for instance
on a big prepreg part
where we want that cosmetic first layer
we might put everything down with nice butt joints
but then the layer that's going to go back behind it
has got to have a different seam line
than right at those joints
so that you have a good overlap everywhere
If we're talking
maybe a non-structural part
maybe it's a body panel
typically how many layers
will be in the laminate?
Yeah, for our typical laminate
it's a 2mm thick laminate
and that's, I mentioned that
6K G-Flow 12K
is I would say our
house recipe standard
I think there's manufacturers who make things a little
thinner, a little cheaper
at about half that thickness
1mm, you'll find a hood
or a fender and you can sort of deflect it with your finger
but we've definitely found that that's our preferred
thickness and stiffness to work with
and of course you can
if the weight really is a high consideration
you can always go down lower but...
Yeah I was just going to say I guess that really does come
to that trade off of strength
and stiffness versus
weight but I mean
I liken this to the
motorsport wiring industry
where weight particularly
if you're looking at the likes of Formula One
obviously it's a massive concern
so particularly for
sensors that are very low current draw
you can go down to very very thin gauge
wire which gives a saving
but for the average
sort of club level race car
if you're a little bit rough with the connector or the sensor
there's not a lot of strength
in the wire so it makes sense
in my mind for that application
let's step up in wire gauge a little bit
add a little bit of weight
but also end up with something that's actually going to be
a bit more fit for purpose and a bit more reliable
than a long term. Exactly
Yep and it comes back to that same thing
I mentioned about strength versus
stiffness driven that yeah
the hood's going to be plenty strong enough
in a single ply of carbon
but as soon as someone leans on it
they're going to push a dent into it
and of course it's going to pop back out
but you risk cracking the clear coat that's on there
or something else so the stiffness
in the end is what we often end up having to drive
the design on.
Just again one more topic with the
these complex parts
that you're laying up. Is there any
process that's required
assuming you're not working with pre-preserve
process required to sort of make sure
that everything is well and truly
driven into every corner and internal
sort of space
prior to sort of vacuum bagging
and resin infusion? Yeah I mean
that is again one of those things
that every technician has to work on
in our shop our process
is every layer checks
by the team lead to come around
and check those layers
because having a bridge
in one corner apart can fail it
easily and so yeah I've got a variety
of different tools plastic
pushers and spatulas even sometimes
custom designed for the part for the
certain area that you're trying to get into
to make sure that you've tucked in every last
one of those corners but things get missed
and yeah you'll have areas that didn't
get tucked in well enough so it does
just come down to that discipline of
making sure you are checking all those areas
you know spray adhesive
as nice as it is to help parts
stick using too much of it
and again cause a bridge where it sticks between
the two walls and you're unable to
push it down the rest of the way
but you think it's down because it's so sturdy
Sure yeah that makes sense
I just I wonder if you have a stat on
you know the number of parts
that end up getting
essentially failing quality control
because of you know
a mistake during the lay up
Yeah we basically count for 10%
failure rate on parts
specifically aesthetic parts
almost always an aesthetic failure
when it comes to a structural thing having a loose
fiber somewhere is not going to be
a failure for it but yeah
because we produce so many aesthetic parts
it's about 10% for aesthetic
Yeah okay perfect
we'll just move into some of the
different techniques of actually
making these components
now and we'll start with a technique
that I'm guessing you probably don't use very much
but the low hanging fruit is
the easiest technique I guess
or a wet lay up
can you maybe just give us a quick definition of
what a wet lay up is and
where that would make sense
Yeah and like I said that's
the first lay up style I learned
when I first got into composites
and it's as simple as taking some
carbon fiber and putting it into a form
or fiberglass over some sort of form
and then wetting it out with some sort of resin
and you can do that with a brush
and brush it into place
one slight step above that
early on I highly recommend if you are
doing wet lamps is to
take your carbon
put it between two sheets of plastic
pour resin across it
between the sheets of plastic
and then squeegee it out across that carbon
that's going to actually do a much
better job of getting an even and uniform
resin distribution through it
that you just want to scrape that resin through it
I think something we probably haven't
actually touched on so far
is in order to get optimal strength to weight
really the ratio
of the composite material
to the
resin that's critical isn't it
Absolutely yeah and that's what
you gain from pre-preg that
when we buy our pre-preg we're speccing it
36% resin content, 40% resin content
and we know exactly what it is
So we have very little control
over that resin content
with a wet lay up but you've just given us
a little tip to at least get a little closer
to the mark and not suffer
from excessive Yep exactly
squeegee it out get as much of it
until you see all those fibers wetted but then
you almost always are going to end up squeegeeing
off extra and then you can open the bag up
and take that sheet and put it into your form
and that's your wet lay up
Okay so this would be
probably the technique I'm guessing
that's used by most
body kit manufacturers with just
a top strand matte fiberglass
into a mold
and that's what you get for your money
Yeah and like I said a chopper gun
really quick way to make a part
chop up the fiber
last typically and spray it in the mold
with the resin it's heavy
not very strong but yeah it makes a part for you
and it's cheap so
absolutely has its applications
Okay in terms of
I think we've probably covered it
to a most of a degree there
but pros and cons
of that technique I'd say the pros
being cheap and easy accessible
cons
strength and weight
yeah strength and weight
overall cosmetics of it
your surface finish is not going to be great
You're not going to use that technique
for something where you want to expose
carbon fiber finish
Yeah I mean you can but it's going to take
a lot more work to get it to that final
state people and people do wraps
you know people wrap parts
which I absolutely hate and do not support
is wrapping plastic pieces
carbon fiber but people do it all the time
and that's very much this
you're draping a wet piece of carbon
over the top of something and trying to
form it into shape there and then build
a bunch of clear up on the top
side of it so you're not actually making it
against the mold form at all
You're sort of trying to get the
carbon fiber look a lot more work
and you're not really going to be seeing the
benefits of the material
and then you put it through one heat cycle
and it breaks right off because that plastic
is so much more than the carbon
so seeing it over and over again
don't do wraps
Tricks to the trade point taken
Moving on I think the next step
of the ladder would be vacuum bagging
so again maybe give us a quick
overview of that technique please
to start with
Yeah and that's just taking everything we just discussed
whether you chop or gunned it
whether you just brushed it in with a brush
or you squeegee it out and put it into a mold
it would be then taking a vacuum bag
you taping around the outside of it
and pulling a vacuum on it
so you are at least compacting
that resin and carbon
under your full 14-ish PSI
So it's forcing it into
the irregularities in different shapes
in the mold better than a wet layup
can it achieve? Yeah, yeah
essentially although one of the things
that people don't recognize is
there's a lot of potential for bridging
and causing issues when you add
a peel ply to the backside
or either bleeder or your vacuum bag itself
every one of those layers
has the opportunity to bridge so you got to be
just as diligent about tucking in every one of those layers
So does that also come
into sort of as
you're starting to pull the vacuum in the bag
sucking down against the peel ply
then also manipulating the bag
into any sort of shapes and crevices
Exactly, yeah highly
recommend having your vacuum on a valve
so you can turn it off while it's at
you know 5 PSI and start pushing
stuff around and work your way in
Yeah, alright a couple more things on that
you mentioned peel ply, what is that
and what benefit does that give us?
Yeah, so peel ply
is going to be applied at the end of
your layup after you finish
applying your carbon or whatever your composite is
as a consumable that's going to be removed
after the fact and it is
as it says in the name
you peel it off at the end
it's a release film would be the other word that people
utilize for it and you can have
a large variety of different types
of peel ply and it's going to
etch the back of your surface for
adhesion preparation
or it will leave it nice and glossy and shiny
like there's Teflon coated ones
that are super slippery
and you even like
the details inspecting this material
a nylon peel ply
wicks a lot of resin out
so great for a wet layup where you actually are
again you know you put too much resin in there
you want to get some more of it out
but the bad thing if you're doing a prepreg layup
where you just have the bare minimum amount of
prepreg resin in there
and now you add a
you suck a bunch of it out and you're like
why is my laminate so dry looking
well you just took a bunch of it out of there
so there's called perf bags which is a plastic
with just tiny little holes in it that you'll
actually typically put down on the backside
of prepreg to prevent that resin
from getting out of your parts
So coming back to our vacuum bag
and away from prepreg we'll deal with that
so that peel ply first of all it's going to
stop the vacuum bag from sticking
to your component so you can actually
remove it and secondly
there is a benefit here in wicking
some of that resin out getting us sort
of closer to their optimal
resin to composite sort of ratio
Yep that's correct
and the reality is your vacuum bag is
actually also going to be
you're not going to stick to your vacuum bag
either if you just use vacuum bag
that's technically okay
it will work the other thing
that the peel ply does
help with a little bit is again just flowing air
across your part so that you get
equal compression across it
and so even in a wet layup
I'd recommend you put
your material down you put your peel ply in
and then you put a breather material
which is like a just a soft
spongy fabric across the back
and that's going to help evenly distribute
that pressure
vacuum pressure across the backside of your part
otherwise you get so much pressure right at your
port but it dies off across your part
Yeah that makes sense
in terms of that pressure
does that also drive any
considerations around the mold
in terms of making sure it's going to be
strong enough and not deform under
the vacuum? Yeah it depends
definitely on the complexity
of that mold if it's a relatively flat
mold just because of how that
pressure is applied it's going to be uniform
but you certainly can't have hollow cavities
I've seen that before
where someone's built a mold
out of wood, plywood or something
and then they try to vacuum
around it and the pressure of 15
PSI across a chunk of wood
this big adds up pretty quickly
and you'll explode a piece of
half inch plywood quite quickly
so you definitely be wary of that
Okay all right
so to sum up we've got a better surface
finish so better aesthetics
better ratio of
resin to our material
so stronger and
lighter let's move up
the next run of the ladder
and look at resin infusion so
give us again a rundown on
what that is and how that differs
from vacuum bagging
Absolutely in that case you're applying
the composite
into the mold in a dry state
so again allows you to have a lot more
time for doing that layup
a lot more attention to detail
placing your laminate cutting your patterns
getting everything into place
where you want it to be you do need to take
into consideration the resin flow
the entire infusion process
so this is where it does take a little bit more
work you're likely going to fail your first couple
parts have you tried to jump into resin infusion
That's something to look forward to
Yeah that's
you have to plan for how that resin
is going to flow from A to B
and evenly fill and cross
your entire part and you can't have it
circle itself and end up with a circle
right in the middle because you're going to trap air
right there so you almost
always want a nice bell curve infusion
that's what we're looking for in our infusions
that it shoots up the middle and then
splits off to the edges
like a bell curve you're just going from side to
side but again you can get quite complex
with tubing lines and layouts
so there's always a high risk
when you're building your first part of something
if it's not something simple and similar
to another product you've made
yeah our engineering team has to
come up with based on experience
and the laminate thickness
and how far we know things flow
based on the thickness of those laminates
how are we going to lay out these tubes
what diameter tubes are they going to be
we do a thicker resin tube
so you're putting more resin in
and a smaller vacuum tube at the other end
and it almost always comes out that you want
this really big resin tube
that almost is like a U shape
and then a really tiny vacuum
and it's like a foot long at the other end of it
again so that you're coming
and closing in on this part
or forming a bell curve up the part
to not risk any circling
I think I'd be sort of
lying awake at night
dreading the first resin infusion
having a nice big patch in the middle
that has no resin
I could see that just being
a real problem
if you have zero experience with this
and you're sort of trying to figure out
as you go it sounds to me
like there's a bit of science involved
and a bit of experience
mixed into understanding
what to do to get optimal results
absolutely
every part is different
and so definitely the wisdom
of experience from doing it over and over again
is probably our biggest driving factor
when it comes down to it
myself and my wife who've done this the most
when we're speccing a new part
are going to come through
and review that and make some changes
and suggestions as to how that really should be laid out
and you can build in redundancies
so you can build in an additional port
where you're saying I'm not entirely certain
this is going to be able to flow the full 8 feet
or 12 feet that this needs to go
let's build in these extra ports
you don't need to use them
but they're there in case
so from what it sounds like here
really the benefit
of resin infusion over conventional vacuum bagging
would be for more complicated parts
because it gives you more working
almost infinite working time
I guess with actually laying up the material
into the mold to start with
absolutely and then
the better properties of
the proper resin ratio
we do a resin calculation
based on the weights of the fabric
and how much we want
that fabric to be saturated with 40% resin
so we can calculate exactly
how much material of resin
we are pumping into it based on the square footage
and we'll calculate that
and run it the first time and it might be a little light
it might not make it all the way across
and we'll have to add a little extra
but you can get yourself pretty close
to that ratio that you're shooting for
so each time we've
stepped up from wet layout to vacuum bagging
and now resin infusion
we're getting closer to that optimal
resin to material
more fabric ratio
yep absolutely
alright so coming back actually one step
because we've just mentioned that the benefit
one of the benefits of the resin infusion
there is the working time
when you're laying the material into the mold
what would be a typical
working time with
a vacuum bagging
how long have you actually got to work with your resin
obviously I guess it's going to
depend on your temperature
that you're working under and maybe the specifics
of the actual resin but if you could ball park us
we're talking sort of 10 minutes
or 30 minutes or an hour
yeah and your epoxies are going to
typically you'll have an option of a slow medium
or fast hardener
with your standard epoxies
slow might give you an hour
even two hours
medium again half an hour maybe and a fast could be only
15 minutes
when you're talking epoxies
when you're looking at vinyl ester and polyester
it's not actually a two part resin system
it's a single resin system with a catalyst
that you add to it in a very small amount
which means polyesters and vinyl esters
curing they're just curing so slow that
you can't see it cure until you add that catalyst
and so you do have a little bit of
adjustability when you're adding a catalyst
to kind of dial it for the temperature
like we have charts on our walls that say
hey when it's this hot out use this much catalyst
to get you a cure time in 15 minutes
and so
generally the rule of thumb though is between
1 and 3 percent for the catalyst
if you go less than that you might risk it
never curing if you go higher than that you can run into some other issues
but you can tailor
that versus epoxy the ratio
of the two is critical
you can't just add less hardener
to make it go a little slower
okay
alright let's jump up to the top
step of the ladder and pre pre
we've sort of already touched on this a bunch of times
and that's the technique that you're going to find
formula one teams using
so again
give us a rundown on how pre pre works
absolutely pre pre
it starts just as your other dry fabrics
would be except it goes through a process
where they actually are taking sheet resins
and rolling it onto either side
sometimes just single side sometimes both
sides and are pressing
sheets of resin partially cured resin
into dry fabric
and then typically putting that on to a roll
and putting it into a freezer so it doesn't start curing on you
because again that has been already
mixed up it's both constituents
of the epoxy
and it is slowly curing
pre pregs generally need to be stored
at specific temperature and have known
out lifetimes
and that's how you're going to receive it and it is
kind of a misconception actually that came up today
here in our shop talking to an employee
of you know oh isn't all
the resins pre impregnated
all the way through the fibers
so they were looking at a panel and saw it was a little dry
on the edge but
reality is the resin is still just sitting on either side
of dry carbon
and when you put it through an oven cycle
you reach a certain temperature
and the viscosity flows out
the most and you need to hit
that viscosity let that resin
flow and that's when it's going to permeate
and actually get into all your fibers
and so if you have a bad cycle or your oven
doesn't run correctly it might go too fast
and it just skips that temperature
location but typically you want it to well there
for a couple hours or to let it wait out
properly yeah let it wet
out and so it is
in a sense infusing just as you would
in your infusion layup but the resin
is just sitting where it needs to be already
and you just have to get it to the right temperature
for it to wet itself out
Many questions on this
so as you mentioned the resin is
kind of there curing
anyway and obviously it's stored in the freezer
or at a lower temperature to slow that
down or prevent it once you've
sort of got it out to a working temperature
typically how long have you got to work
with pre-preg sheet before
it's no good yeah
we love the material we use
it actually has a 70 day out life
on it we
truthfully when we buy this material
we'll just put it right on to our kidding machines
rack and we go through a roll every week
so you're skipping the freezing
part because you're using it so frequently
and it's got a suitable
we have a freezer and a full walk
in fridge and freezer but we
most of store beer in there
that's reasonable
yeah so
the reality is yeah if you're using it
fast enough but we have
there are projects where we've used materials
that are a higher
final
temperature than they can withstand
for being around the engine bay and a component
in a car that can go up to
400-500 degrees fahrenheit that stuff
had a four hour out life
so you had to
do your layup very quick and
if you didn't finish that layup you were rolling
that mold with the unfinished parts
back into the freezer or into the fridge
to keep it at low enough temperature
to sit overnight for you to finish the next day
yeah well
curing these parts
traditionally it's done in an autoclave
which adds heat
and pressure
these days out of autoclave cure
prepregs are seemingly becoming more and more
common and I kind of feel
like maybe an advanced
enthusiast could also
leverage that material as well
can you give us
sort of insight into pros and cons
of autoclave versus out of
autoclave cure prepregs
absolutely I mean when you go
to that autoclave pressure you know you're going
from 15 psi which
is really all you can get with vacuum pressure
to now this pressure vessel that
you're going to go up to maybe 50 psi on
so tripling
quadrupling the amount of pressure
you are going to compact it just that much
further you're going to
reduce the size of voids
by it that much
it's quite noticeable when you paint
something that's raw carbon
every single one of the cross hatches of a
twill weave there's technically a hole
there no matter how hard you press it
there is a tiny
tiny void there and when
you vacuum bag it and you compare it to
an autoclave party it gets better
and truthfully we actually we also run
heated presses in our shop
which are even a step above
an autoclave in the sense that they
pressure significantly higher
2000 pounds or hundreds
of psi can be applied
and we can when we go
and paint these parts you can again it's so
easy to paint a part that's been made under
100 psi compared
to 14 psi because those air bubbles
that are there microscopic
there get smaller and smaller and the
the clear coat just flows right over instead
of forming a pinhole around it
okay all right obviously
the downside with an autoclave
is cost
it's going to be a very
expensive piece of equipment and
completely out of the realm of
most home enthusiasts so these
out of autoclave like how
first of all I guess how do we cure
out of autoclave we already sort of talked a little bit
about the oven but is this just a case
of hope the wife's out for a few hours
and chuck it in the domestic oven in the kitchen
or are we a little bit more advanced than that?
You absolutely can do that I would
say I've done that before and I think
back in my college house when we were
testing things is you can make something
in your oven at home and if you're going to run
a vacuum line in there you want it to be under vacuum
still so that's a point we haven't
actually sort of clarified these components
are still vacuum bagged prior
to curing yep exactly
you still need to it's often called
debulking where you want to hold it under
vacuum for a while before you even go ahead
and put temperature to it we'll even do
debulks part way through a layup to
compact the layers part
way through but yeah you need to pull it under vacuum
debulk it and then get it into your
oven and run it through it's cure cycle
and again the materials can be you can do
it on a very simple oven setup
you can build your own at home oven
you can use a powder coating oven
and just monitor the temperature
and you can cure prepreg parts
you're going to not have the best
flow out and best surface finish
if you don't get it to that right temperature
and let it dwell but you can absolutely
make you know great at home
parts out of prepreg with a very basic oven setup
in terms of that that cure
what does that look like is that a
case of get it up to X temperature
hold it there for I don't know a few
hours and you're done or is it
time at set specific
temperatures during the cure yep
it is you know it's going to depend
on the prepreg itself they all spec a
different cure cycle but you know
for example the stuff that we use
every day it's going to be
you know at 1 to 4 degrees celsius
per minute ramp up
to 160 Fahrenheit
hold for 4 hours
then ramp from there up to
120 degrees Fahrenheit
and hold for 4 more hours
after that cool it down
basically stop running the oven
don't close the doors let it cool off naturally
back down to room temperature
and so that's a cure cycle that
will just run overnight in our oven
okay I have heard
somewhere and I don't remember
where if there's any truth in it that
your domestic kitchen oven
the temperature the accuracy of the
temperature control is maybe a bit
questionable for curing prepreg yeah
I mean you really ideally
you have a PID controller with
a thermal couple directly on your
part that's actually running the control
that is one thing that you'll see
an oven is going to reach a far higher
temperature than your surface temperature
and so having a PID controller where you
have a thermal couple that's actually
driving the oven on your part
is very valuable
I guess your Sunday roast probably
doesn't really mind too much if it's
plus or minus 5 degrees but your
prepreg part may
yeah and again it kind of comes down to
just making sure you hit that viscosity
you truly can just throw it in the oven
it's going to cure
in just your basic oven
but it might not flow out
and actually permeate those fibers
so it'll work and be structurally
sound but the aesthetics
might not be 10 out of 10
yes and structurally
you do have to worry about if those fibers
didn't flow out and get wetted
yeah of course that makes sense
this might be a bit of a
question of how long is a piece of string
but just to give us some perspective
if you were doing
the reson infusion
technique using carbon fiber
versus prepreg carbon fiber
could you give us a sense
of the cost difference
in the materials are we talking
5 times as much, 2 times
as much, 10 times as much
yeah you know
when you're doing a reson infusion you're buying the
fabric and the reson already
and then when you're prepreg
they come all in one roll together
and so it really is only about 2x difference
going from buying
the reson in the fabric by itself
and then going to a prepreg
about even 1.5 to 2x
when you look at the sum of those two materials
compared to the prepreg
okay that's actually nowhere near what
I'd think so the complexity really
is around the curing process
and oven that's big enough to cure it in
yep and the tooling
again you need tooling that can also withstand
that temperature
and that comes back to what you were saying earlier
if you were using aluminium
for example the expansion of that material
at the curing temperature's going to
really impact the result
exactly
I think we've probably
managed to
extract as much knowledge as I think I can
for today so I think we'll move towards
wrapping this up and of course
we've got the same three questions we ask
all of our guests
the first of those is what's next in the future
for you and Common Fibers
well it was
good talking to you about monocoque chassis
design and inside of things
that we're actually
starting to put our feelers out on
and starting the design process on is
the reality is we are really America's only
monocoque chassis building company
right now the monocoques
are built in Europe elsewhere
and so we are actually
looking to develop
our own in-house monocoque chassis
that can be utilized for
race car builder applications
that is a generic
chassis base platform
so that's something we're excited about is
we've got a lot of experience the last
five years building these and
it's definitely a hole in the market
that we're seeing of being able to provide
this sort of solution
for builders
would this be are you sort of looking at
a generic
monocoque for a Wings and Slicks style
single cedar or is this more of a
sports car
and there's a couple of different avenues
that we're playing out right now
it's a small scale as a go cart
and then it's a large scale of
Pikes Peak Challenge cars that are
getting built custom built
so right now we're still feeling out
what those different model versions
might be
but there is some folks
doing this over in the UK
but again it's the cost of shipping
and getting these parts out here that we think
we can develop America's first
monocoque chassis that's a little more accessible
than the millions of dollars
that it takes to develop one custom
yeah no exciting
alright next question
is there any advice you'd give to a younger version
of yourself to help reach where you are today
in your career faster
seems like you've done it pretty fast actually
straight out of college and 13 years
of slog and
yeah it seems like it's working out
yeah and I think I can still give some advice
I mean my wife and I
both being engineers we've always run this
as an engineering company
definitely didn't always have the best
you know business know-how behind
everything and so we've
survived and done good by it but
I think going back and providing some
advice of understanding the business
side of things a little bit more
you know it's fun to build things
and that's gotten us where we are
but there is a lot that goes into
business development that we've learned
along the way and so maybe taking
some courses and understanding that
a little earlier on would have been nice
yeah I think I've said this probably
a dozen times or more
on the podcast but the usual
entrepreneurial journey is you
start a business because you're good at
a thing and then quickly find out
that you can only spend half of your day
if you're lucky doing that thing
and then there's all of the other
monotones tasks that come with
operating a business that are unfortunately
just as critical as being really good
at the thing you're producing
exactly luckily for us it was
actually just problem solving and that's
a running of businesses constantly solving
problems but
putting fires out
putting fires out exactly quite literally
all right Gabe if
people want to follow you and see what
you're up to how they best to do so
where do we find you
you definitely can find us on all your
standard social media sites
at common fibers
all one word yeah Instagram
is definitely where we are the most active
and we're posting our own DIY videos
of how we make parts if you want to see
how we ran our infusion channel
lines and watch the infusion
I would recommend starting there
I would also
wholeheartedly recommend
starting there as I mentioned that's how
you came across our radar and
probably wasted a few hours
wasted no spent a few hours it's
definitely not a waste watching the
mesmerizing of reels that you're
producing so look it's great
to sit down and have a chat and find out
a little bit more about what's going on behind
the scenes and obviously all the technical
knowledge that you were happy enough to provide
so thank you very much for your time Gabe.
Absolutely thank you it's been a pleasure.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of
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