Fun with carbon fibre

[rainman_16]

Tis the time of year to prepare for the racing season. At the end of every year I tell myself that I don't need to make any more modifications to my car and every year I contradict myself. This year is no different.

For the last three days I've been working with some good buddys to improve the aerodynamics of my car... specifically increase downforce. We spent between us approximately 70 man hours so far building a CF splitter from scratch. Thankfully for me this isn't the first time that one of my friends has worked with this amazing material.

To begin we needed to create a template of a splitter using some poor quality board I picked up from the local home reno store.

We used this to trace the outline needed to approximate the dimensions of the splitter, determine mounting points, etc.

Next the cutting. The hole in the middle is to accomodate the low hanging header


Fitment is looking OK so far


Next we traced and cut out the structural foam that acts as the light weight core for the splitter and insert the plywood mounting plates


Now I've skipped a few steps to get to this point but here we are applying resin to three layers of CF and also the structural core


Lots of patience and cutting is beginning to pay off


Applied two more layers of CF with a generous helping of resin, making more cuts and almost ready to bag and place in a vacuum.


Let the curing begin!!


24 hours later and Christmas morning comes in March


Almost finished... just need to trim the excess with tin snips and sand to a smooth finish. It is amazing how sharp the edges were before sanding. Two of us cut ourselves handling the edges.


The finished product is about 4' x 6' and weighs only 12.8 lbs. Just need to fabricate some quick release mounts, build an air dam from CF and I'm off to the races.