Carbon fibre question...

Just musing outloud (well, online) but does anyone work with carbon fibre?

Curious if it would be possible (and economically viable) to coat a set of egg crate louvres with carbon fibre. If using a proper vacuum setup, could you coat the louvres so they looked as if they were made from carbon fibre?

Hmmmm.....

If you want to do that, get someone with one of those water suspended laminating setups. They print a foil on a water soluable backing (when activated), then they put it in water, the backing dissolves and the part is then pressed down and submerged. This wraps the printed foil around it for excellent results. It's fake but it will look quite good.

Vac bagging and such is very labor intensive

Wayne,
I spent 2 years in a factory wiring up the machine that made the material for the MX missile.
Although I really don't know crap about it, I can outline a rough process.
The carbon fiber cloth is pre-impregnated with a uniform coating of the polymer. It is laid out on a mold that represents the good side. A layer of plastic is the topping, to which a vacuum fitting is attached. Then, while under vacuum, the mold is slid into an autoclave for curing at XXX* and XXX minutes depending on material and thickness, blah blah blah.
Not vey specific I know, but basically how it's done. I am sure, like anything, there is WAY more to it than that.

Twin_Turbo said:

If you want to do that, get someone with one of those water suspended laminating setups. They print a foil on a water soluable backing (when activated), then they put it in water, the backing dissolves and the part is then pressed down and submerged. This wraps the printed foil around it for excellent results. It's fake but it will look quite good.

Vac bagging and such is very labor intensive

Click to expand...

Do you know the proper name for this process TT? Sounds interesting (and expensive?!?!)

big2bird said:

...I am sure, like anything, there is WAT more to it than that.

Click to expand...

I've since found a couple of sites where carbon fibre is used in a decorative (non structural) role and for that purpose, would appear to be reasonably straight forward to do. Basically, they lay carbon fibre on an existing item (they used a C3 style mirror) and coated it with a (from memory) polyester resin then put it in a vacuum bag. The result looked quite good. It would be a major pita to do the egg crates like that though, TT's idea sounds better...

It's very cheap compared to the real deal, all the ricers use it

I think it's called (translation) water transfer printing.

I have used this process for some prototypes we have made and we use a company in Ohio, www.lakotacorp.com. The website shows the process. Their main business is wrapping camo emulsion on stuff but they have done CF for us in the past. It looks great.

Interesting process, anything you can take a picture of can be wrapped on a surface.

yeah, they just print it on a foil, put the foil in water, spray on an agent that dissolves the foil itself (paint carrier) and then you dip the part in it

Thanks for the replies guy. I've found a place in Brisbane that does it so I'll email them some pics and see if they can give me a rough price to do my louvres...