Quote:
Originally Posted by look 171
Lugged carbon frames still has that real nice riding quality to 'em. My Time is lugged so was my Look. But the latest monocoque carbon frames are amazing. I think finally, engineers are able to dial in that special feel in the past 10 years. Stiff where's needed, compliant where necessary.
I think building a steel frame is hard enough (I don't know how to weld or braze), but a carbon frame must be dead accurate. That's a tough built. If you do, please keep us in the loop. I for one would love to see all the details that goes into doing this. My only experience was help built the solar car's carbon fiber body back in college. This was when carbon was the rage, new material that are just as strong as metal but light as a feather. That was how they sold it to us. I already knew about it from bike frames.
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The big boys have the bucks. They use CNC machined aluminum molds, 250 F cure prepreg carbon fiber uni directional cloth and they cure the bike in an autoclave at around 100 psi. The parts come out perfect without any voids or air pockets in the laminate and all the extra resin is squeezed out of the part.
If I built a bike in my garage I would have to use soft molds made out of fiberglass or maybe even plastic from a 3D printer. I'll use a woven dry fabric with room temp cure epoxy and I'll use a vacuum bag to compact the parts while the resin cures. My frame would be maybe 25% heavier. I don't have the analysis skills and programs to do a real finite element analysis that a big firm can afford. I would just build a bike and do a destructive test on it.
ugh.. I tried building a bike 20 years ago and wasn't happy with it. Its in a landfill now somewhere in Riverside.
Anyone read Kevin Cameron's column in Cycleworld? He talks about racebikes as being ideas of the guys who built those machines. Every season you get a machine with new ideas and the old machine is unceremoniously dumped in a shredder.
I have to get my Cannondale on the road. I've thought about it today and I'm going to get new tires (if they fit), so go from 23 to 32 and borrow the mountain bike stem from my sisters old race bike. Raise the bars up 2 1/2" and fatter tires may make the bike comfortably enough to start putting on miles. Three months from now I'll have all the cobwebs blown out.