"Easy" carbon-fiber bug body
 

Just make the body out of carbon fiber! :mrgreen:

Technical details so you can try it at home:

4 oz. resin, 2 layers of cloth, 6 hours in the vacuum bag to get as much air out of the mold as possible. However, the vac sucked pretty hard and wanted to crush the body, so I dialed it down to -5in Hg. So there's a few voids, but at least the body isn't crushed like, well, a bug :lol:

I'll get a pic in the sun later.

Thats sweet!!! It looks like your a VERY organized person!! lol

oooooooohhhhhh could you make me a body? I have a Tamiya Audi A4 body I'd like to replicate.

Looks allot like my benches! :mrgreen: Organized chaos!:mrgreen:

Very sweet shell man!

Hell you should see my shop! Im going on 10 mos building my rig and not one time have I cleaned"thumbsup"

That body looks sweet!

Wow!

I love that actual carbon look....

what is the creamy frosting on the top of the hood?? is that the leftover resin? is there a way to get rid of the resin look? I'm very intersted in what you are doing:) How strong is the body? could it be used for racing? can the windows be cut out and look clean? how much did the cloth cost you for the project??

That white is mold release wax I believe?

I have a roll of CF waiting for something to be done like this...

The body is way stronger than the original Lexan, even with the windows cut out.

The creamy goo on the hood is indeed resin that didn't get cloth pulled into it. If I could really crank up the vacuum, that problem would go away. Since the Lexan is pretty flimsy, I could only draw it down to about -1/6 atmosphere, which isn't enough for a perfect pull. With a stronger mold it'd be no problem. As it is I had to jam a chunk of foam between the doors to keep them from collapsing when it was on the tit.

The carbon is pretty cheap when you buy it in 10-yard rolls :shock: This was made from scraps, so the cloth didn't cost anything. There's probably about two bucks' worth in it, though, and $20 in the resin. The boss doesn't exactly know I made it, though ;-)

GULA, if the A4 is already painted, the paint will transfer over to the carbon, so I hope you like that paint job. And given the amount of trouble that this one gave me releasing, I won't guarantee that you'll get it back in one piece.

Once the resin is cured, it's easy to cut. I did the fenders with body scissors and the windows with a Dremel. Still needs some stickers to give it a splash o' color.

Id throw on some clear coat if I were you. Itll make the voids look nicer and itll give it a nice finnish.

Nice! That is pretty awesome looking, and probably very sturdy.

Looks awesome, and once you start pounding on it, the voids won't be so noticeable. I reckon you need to make a plug and start pulling these full time, that should help fund your other projects!!

Would you be willing to make another????:) i have a race revo that would love this sort of thing!

As far as making another one, I'll have to check with da boss. I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to go into the RC-body-making business, and we need the resin for our UAV builds. Half-inching a couple ounces for personal use is one thing, but if gallons of the stuff start disappearing it's gonna be a problem.

Get all the materials here: http://www.fibreglast.com/

That looks great,turned out well.You said you used a vacuum bag?Can you explain a little about the vacuuming process?I have a couple of 1/5 scale gassers I would love to make some carbon bodies for and this seems in my price range,lol.Keep us updated on the strength of the new shell."thumbsup"

There are a buch of ways to do the vaccuum bagging. From the FoodSavers (yup, those things on TV that suck the air out of a bag and seal it), to using an old Refridgerator compressor some valves, a guage, and a bag, and there's some guys using a handpump.

The handpump is the cheap way to go, but you have to keep pumping occasionally as some air gets back into the bag. The fridge compressor and a reservior tank is a good way to go if you're doing many parts.

here's a link to a forum with a TON of info on it. These guys get freaky anal about some of the stuff they make and the quality of parts. (Mostly high performance sailplanes) For doing bodies with little or no structural needs, I think you can get away with a pretty simple setup.

http://www.rcgroups.com/composites-fabrication-210/

The vacuum bag is widely used in fiberglass/CF fabrication. The idea is to squeeze all the extra air out of the resin by placing the piece (in this case a Lexan body with CF and resin inside) into a plastic bag and sucking all the air out of the bag. The atmosphere outside the bag then forces the fabric and resin into all the corners of the mold.

That is, if the mold is rigid enough to take it. Our vacuum pump will suck down to -1 atmosphere, or -30in Hg. But at around -5in Hg (inches of mercury, just like on a barometer) the Lexan starts to deform. The lip around the bottom of the body pulled up to the fenders, the doors caved in, and the scoop on the roof tried to pull the roof panel down. So I backed it off a little and wedged a block of foam in between the doors.

The whole process goes down like this:

The body is already coated with a mold-release agent. I refreshed it with some mold-release spray. Mix the resin, wet the fabric, lay it into the body. The resin has a 20-minute pot life, so hurry up. Once it's laid up, take the bag that the body came in, spray it with the mold-release, and lay it inside the body, over the CF and resin. Then lay your breather cloth (polyester batting) over that and slide the whole thing into the vacuum bag. Make sure the breather cloth is aligned with the nipple. Seal the bag, start the suction, watch the body collapse, back off the suction.

Come back in six hours. Turn off the pump, remove the body from the bag, hit it with a heat gun til you see the Lexan release from the resin. Then tug like a mofo to get it out of there.

the body is stiffer than lexan but how is it for being brittle

Got my interest for sure,I do have a foodsaver vac machine,but how would you rig it to stay on continous?It stops after a few minutes when all the air is sucked out.Might have to look into another type of vac pump.

Aaron, if I really wanted to bomb-proof it, I could use Kevlar in the mix. I've got some tiger cloth (carbon-Kevlar weave) but it's really hard to cut.

I don't imagine this body will last forever. Eventually it will fail, but as light as this rig is it won't be soon. A really good hit will punch a hole in CF (prop strike, for example) but for the most part the fibers keep it together.

now, what if you cut the windows out of the lexan?
would they fit into this body?