146: From Home Builds to Hypercars: Composites for Everyone

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.

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