Carbon Fiber Bodywork

hold on ......exhaaaaaaaaleeeeeeeeeeeeeee...whooooooooooooooooh....


bubble bubble bubble bubble.......cough....coughhhhhhhhh........whoooooooh....

o.k now i'm on the same page as you...what were you saying????

i did see a dude a while back auctioning some early z-1 style experimental carbon efforts...one later attempt was almost close to exact copy and i believe they required mounting tab creativity in his trial designs...he claimed to have acvheived his aim and no longer needed the early designs/ trial covers (2 or 3 of varied finish)...they bid below what i thought 15-30 i think

anyways did anyone see that auction on e-bay for those hand made templates....????

hey did you crack a page or two of that book.... or the one you got...did you ever get the modern sport bike performance edition by cameron...when i first read the edition one TDC it was like finding some lost woodstock hendrix recordings....feel frre to share it with responsible borrowers as long as it's circuit makes it this way one day......peace

when i was really young we used to ride our bikes up to cal poly (san luis obispo) and see the poly royal festeval...ride the corny ticket carnival set up----pedal out to the agg section and watch the giant pigs with babies----and cruise the open house classrooms for goodies...one thing we kids would seek out was a section where college students would churn out swirl colored frisbies from a big tech machine room...those were cool frisbies...still warm and with little casting scabs...anyhow....

if someone was talented and knew the method to produce quality sidecovers...with a truet match....then complete sets ...like you said for sure the hard to find MKII...ZIR...and the infamous left side kz....the world market might provide a payback...or at least the maker would be held in high regard by the kz crowds for sure...
can you say "barter system"

porchev914 wrote:

Aww Craig, I think you're only serious in your own thread. I'm pretty sure no one has ever been serious about a titanium key blank. Incidently, the swiss cheese from Switzerland that I saw on "how its made" didn't have any holes in it. And how is that air going to be used in your project again? Maybe to help keep that euphoric high going that supports the "stock is best" point of view? :laugh: I wasn't arguing, just clarifying the truth in your post, I am working on a part that is just for looks, no other reason. Although, perhaps I should be looking to replicate MKII or Z1R side covers, as they seem to be in much shorter supply?

How long ago was it that you saw them on ebay? I have been checking ebay off and on for sidecovers for the last year or so, but I never ran across any carbon products.

There is a modern sportbike edition, or are you refering to TDC 2? I have only read the first chapter of TDC, as well as the Muzzy chapter. That book won't leave my possesion until I return it to you. I don't know anyone that would appreciate it and that I trust :dry:

I had thought about replicating the stock covers, but the mounting points become much more complicated. I would need to design and build a jig to correctly locate custom machined push tabs and epoxy them onto the CF sidecover. It could be done, no doubt. And something that may need to be considered for MKII style covers, since I don't know if an aftermarket bolt on exists for that application. Though with my bike, to be honest, I like the idea of bolt on covers with aircraft 1/4 turn fasteners. Not everyone (like you Craig) is into stuff like that, but you have quite the collection of damn cool parts for your bikes that I would drool over

I've got several ideas on how to make a stock sidecover replication work, I just don't have the experience to weed out my own bad ideas and make the good ones work without reinventing the wheel! Damn independant left Kz sidecovers..... always leaving us for some road side shoulder....

when my mind wrapped around your reproducing sets comment..i thought right away of that 35 yr old summer bike ride...and the smell of plastics right outta the mold ..where some freshman would pass me a perfect frisbie still warm ........i see it now in my also untrained fabbers mind....

where the right material is in sticks ,like glue gun blanks...the stick/plastics blank

---

gets fed into a melter....think hash maker.....and gets pushed into a two piece mold and a set of butterfly nuts and clevis hold it under it's internal pressure ti fill voids and expel air.......think cermaic duck......there it cools for just a second or two and is formed in a finished quality with the tabs and even the emblme holes and made in L.A on the inside ,,,all in an, open the mold and set in the pile and repeat style.......

this would be a simple set up that could produce an exact match...the feeder material/supply blanks would need to be of a consistancy and qualities that once fired it would never be the same consistancy again...think sunglasses frames material...low initial melting points but stong as abs once heated and cooled.....

Nice explanation Tri but I just asked what time it was. :S

porchev914 wrote:

There is a modern sportbike edition, or are you refering to TDC 2? I have only read the first chapter of TDC, as well as the Muzzy chapter. That book won't leave my possesion until I return it to you. I don't know anyone that would appreciate it and that I trust :dry:

i would appreciate it. but i already have the new and old versions, of modern sportbike , by K cameron. its a great read.both books are pretty much the same. it opened my eyes to a lot of things. read it from cover to cover. you'll love it.

Aww Mark, I didn't mean anyone I knew here. I meant people I have personal contact with. Nobody understands why I do the things I do with my bike....poor bastards :laugh:

i understand...

I know you do :kiss: it looks like used injection molding machines aren't too bad- 4k to 7k for an appropriately sized unit. But then there is the small material of having the molds made, and I have no idea what the cost is on that. Probably 1k-2k. Plus you gotta learn how to use the damn thing not to mention the industrial power supply required to run it.

see thats where the dream squasher hides aye???

what we do is find some poor soul already into one for his sack,and all done re-porducing rubber duckies circa 1951....
who is just sitting around in a barn thinking"whatta i make now"....
And here we come with his solution to bordom.....

can you imagine how many molds it would take??

right and left sides and a tail,for.....

1973
1976
1978
1979
1980
1981 x 3 models

and that's just the liter bikes....

24 molds just to cover the common big bores from 73 -81 if my counts right.....

i digress.....

back to your carbon fiber chain guard project...nice work........Craig

I was mearly pointing out the practical obstacles to overcome in such and endeavor. But you're right, I'm sure someone on this site is connected to an injection molding machine someway, so it would be a matter of having the dies made and reproducing the parts. I would think that having a company like Z1 to sell through you could meet the volume necessary to recoup the tooling costs, and in the process fill a small parts nich underserved by the current aftermarket or the factory.

We'll see if it's nice work soon enough....I don't expect too much from my first mold, with the learning curve and all. Here's to hoping! :laugh:

Carbon fiber chain gaurd????? Have you been huffing that alpine air again? :laugh: :laugh: