Quote:
Originally Posted by Won
Last summer, we did a re-fit of a new monocoque for a now defunct F1 team, after they smashed up the car at the last race before the summer shutdown. It was absolutely shocking how much body filler was in the old one, let alone the amount of paint. Worse yet, every void on any bonded component was full of adhesives. I know some smart engineers who worked there, and wonder how they felt about the shop guys undoing hours of hard work and grams saved in CAD 
So that's what the other end of the grid is doing! The colour was metallic British racing green  |
Won, its VERY good you see the bad and the ugly as you start out on your motorsport but make sure you never ever compromise on weight unless it is for structural or stiffness reasons.
Most F1 teams will run a weight register on the painted parts, each part will have a unique life number. Weights before and after each paint will be recorded so as to check they don't get heavier as the season goes on with each time they are repainted. Before repainting the panel is taken back to as close to bare carbon as you can when dealing with carbon skin thicknesses thinner than a sheet of paper.
The painted weight register also makes it easier to make sure your heavier driver gets the lighter parts or your faster driver gets the lighter parts.
As I've gone off an a F1 paint tanget I'll keep going, some F1 teams don't paint their magnesium wheels to save on unsprung weight, about 75g/0.17lb a corner.
One big problem with painting carbon fibre is 'print through', this causes the surface to have a slight weave texture to it due to the difference between the stiffnes of the resin and carbon. kevlar, hybrid or whatever fibres are used.
For a perfect example of this look at any Ferrari F40, it has a 30 footer paint job, I'd still have one though as its the super car I most lust after. With the McLaren F1 road car painting it was a multi-step process about 7 stages from memory, one of the first steps was to paint the car with a hard shell of epoxy resin before flatting it back to a perfectly smooth finish.
Honeycomb cored panels require a lot of work to get flat as the carbon skin sinks a little bit into each cell of the honeycomb to create a golf ball effect and any holes in the outer skin are almost impossible to fill
I'll stop now as I'm starting to sound like a geeky paint weight wennie
