Quote:
Originally Posted by nospiners
This panel is a godsent for someone that needs to do this. I did the metal panel delete 2 years ago on my 86 backdate and it took minimum of 3 full days of work between welding , then smoothing and prepping the metal for filler ,then sanding and more sanding than i care to remember..
Thank you Jonny042 for all you do for this community !!
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You (and everyone else!) are welcome. Really I'm just trying to fill the voids in the market, of which there seemed to by several sunroof sized holes!
I feel like there's a need for nicely made, sturdy, and lightweight bits for these cars. At a reasonable cost, of course.
The decklid hinges are a bit of a diversion - I should probably working on lower hanging fruit, but these have been calling out to me, and will be a perfect accompaniment to the decklid.
Keeping on topic for a technical forum - can it be done? Of course carbon fiber is stronger and stiffer than steel, by weight. And by quite a bit, too. But that's by weight. A figure often thrown around is 10 times as strong. But that's probably a part purely in tension without any bending forces, concentrations of stress around fasteners,, non-ideal load paths, etc.
In other words, who knows. The only way for me to see if this is going to work is to try it! Any the experiment will pay it forward to future Jon when he goes on to try make some other part of questionable benefit and weight savings!
So the hypothesis of the experiment is this. If I reproduce a stamped steel part from carbon fiber, with exactly the same thickness and geometry, it will be 1/5th the weight of the original part. And given that carbon fiber is stronger than steel by some order of magnitude, said part will
as strong or stronger than the original one.
I already know the answer to this, and it is "NO". The orientation of the fibers in the cloth would have to be optimized, and most likely the design drastically changed, for it to be so. The material properties are simply too different. For the experiment to be a complete success, stamping the part from a lighter material like titanium would be a better starting point.
BUT!!!! If I change the hypothesis to: If I reproduce a stamped steel part from carbon fiber, with exactly the same thickness and geometry, it will be 1/5th the weight of the original part. And given that carbon fiber is stronger than steel by some order of magnitude, said part will be
strong ENOUGH to replace the original one.
In this case these carbon hinges will only ever be used to hold on/up a carbon decklid which is only a fraction of the weight of the original steel one. Amazingly the original steel hinge design from 1965 lasted until 1989, and along the way did more and more work including hold up some fairly ridiculous appendages, plus AC condensers. So it was obviously well overbuilt. Herein lies the opportunity to lighten things up a fair amount.
If you got his far, thank you for you patience. I'm out of coffee, so here is a final teaser pic of the pattern, so we can all get on with our day!
