Hi. I am veryinterested in purchasing necessary kits required to make carbon fairings for myyam R6, i'm sure you are asked about this sort of thing all of the time so iapologize if this is a bit repetitive.. I want the whole thing in carbon, soits a fairly large surface area. can you possibly give me a price foreverything i need and allow for spare just in case.. and some advice as ivnever done anything like this, however i am pretty good with my hands and amvery keen to try it. thank you in advance
Liam

Hi Liam,

This is a question we get asked a lot so I'll do my best to provide a thorough answer that should be useful to other members too.

I'm assuming that you've got a set of original fairings in reasonably good condition. You'll be using these fairings as 'patterns' to make mould from.

Taking each fairing panel at a time (removed from the bike of course) you'll need to position barriers all the way around the outside of each panel using a material such as Correx (which is the fluted plastic sign board estate agents use) which we tend to temporarily glue in place on the reverse side of the panel using a hot-melt glue gun. Once you have this perimeter of sign board all the way around the outside of the panel you use Filleting Wax to smooth and fill the gap between the edge of the fairing panel and the signboard. We've got a video that we'll be releasing soon which includes this process; I'll be sure to add a link to this article when it's published.

You then coat the panels and the barriers that you've added with Chemical Release Agent and Mould Release Wax so that the mould materials you will use won't stick to the panels.

For reasonably large moulds like a full set of fairing panels I would suggest our Uni-Mould Tooling System. It's cost effective and zero shrink (normal polyester resin and chopped strand mat will shrink, particularly on larger moulds, which means the replacement panels you make using them would not fit back on the bike properly). It’s also designed to be compatible with any resin system meaning that once you’ve made the moulds, you could use them to make top end carbon fibre/epoxy parts or low-end csm/polyester panels if you wanted.

To give you a really rough idea about how much Uni-Mould you would need to make a whole set of bike fairings, I would think it would be something like 25kgs of Uni-Mould Tooling Resin, 5kgs of Uni-Mould Coupling Coat and 5kg of Uni-Mould Tooling Gel Coat. In addition you’d want about 1kgs of 150g CSM (Chopped Strand Mat) and 15kg of 450g CSM.

Here's links to the materials used in the Uni-Mould system:

Uni-Mould Tooling Gel Coat
Uni-Mould Coupling Coat
Uni-Mould Tooling Resin

There are some specific steps to follow when using the Uni-Mould system but most of the process is just like normal fibre-glassing. If you want to read up in advance then take a look at the Introduction and Application guide for the system.

Making the Replacement Carbon Fibre Motor Bike Fairings

Now you get to the fun part, making the carbon fibre replacement fairings themselves. For panels this size where you’re after a show quality finish and want them to be as strong and light as possible then you really only have one choice for making them and that is to use a process known as resin infusion. In this process the moulds (made from Uni-Mould as described in the previous section) are prepared with a chemical release agent before carbon fibre fabric is laid dry into the mould (along with any other reinforcement that are being used such as glass or Kevlar and any core materials) and then the whole mould is enclosed in a special vacuum bag. The bag is connected to a vacuum pump and the pump sucks all of the air out of the bag, pressing the carbon and other reinforcements hard against the mould’s surface.

Once this has been done a special ‘infusion’ epoxy resin is allowed to be sucked into the mould and infuses through the reinforcement, wetting it as it goes. The resin supply is then clamped off and in many instance the pump is clamped off to and can be switched off. Once the panel has cured it can be removed from the mould. If the mould has a smooth, glossy surface then the part will have exactly the same smooth glossy surface. Resin infused panels will pretty much be as strong and light as any carbon fibre part could be with no trapped air-bubbles and no voids or defects.

To get a good understanding of the resin infusion process, please take a look at the video for our Resin Infusion Starter Kit which shows us making a large carbon fibre bonnet scoop using this technique. Although typical bike fairings are slightly larger than the scoop we make in the video, the process would be exactly the same and the vacuum pump we include in the kit would be more than adequate for any size bike fairing panel.

The reinforcement for the panels themselves could be almost any combination of carbon, Kevlar and core material, depending on how strong or how light you want the finished panels to be. For race panels we sometimes only use 1 layer of 200g and 1 layer of 450g. This makes for a carbon panel only 0.75mm thick, clearly this is very thin (and so very light) but would be a bit too thin for daily use.

A really nice combination for stiffer panels (although not suitable in really tight angular corners) is a single layer of 200g carbon, a single layer of 3mm Soric SF core material and then a final layer of 200g carbon on the inside to balance the laminate (make is symmetrical). This layup has two advantages, one is that the 3.5mm overall thickness seems to be a nice thickness for a body panel, proving to be plenty strong enough and yet, because the core is low density, very light. The other advantage of using Soric is that it acts as an internal flow media for the resin infusion process meaning that you don’t need peel ply or infusion mesh – instead the resin runs through the Soric and wets out the surrounding carbon.

For small or more angular fairing panels, it will probably just be a case of using multiple layers of 200g cloth (maybe 5 layers) or a layer of 200g 2/2 twill carbon and a layer of 660g carbon fibre cloth to add thickness.

You'd need the Resin Infusion Starter Kit and you'd also need a quantity of the IN2 Epoxy Infusion Resin but that would then be everything you need to complete the project and you'd have the whole lot for less than the cost of a set of fairings!

If you want a real ballpark figure of how much of the various materials to buy then I would consider the following:

List of materials for making moulds for a complete set of motorcycle fairings

100g Tin of Number 8 Mould Release Wax - £6.50
500ml Chemical Release Agent- £16.50
25kgs Uni-Mould Tooling Resin - £114.00
5kgs Uni-Mould Coupling Coat - £45.60
5kgs Uni-Mould Tooling Gel Coat - £52.50
15kgs 450gsm Chopped Strand Mat - £76.65
1kgs 150gsm Chopped Strand Mat - £6.00
75mm Plastic Finned Roller - £5.20
Box of 100 Nitrile Gloves - £4.99
1L Acetone - £4.50
Box of 12 3” Laminating Brushes - £16.47

List of equipment for manufacturing a complete set of carbon fibre motorcycle fairings:

Composites Vacuum Pump - £169.95
Professional Resin Infusion Catch-Pot - £79.95
30m Coil Clear PVC Vacuum Hose - £21.95
2x Infusion Line Clamps - £9.00
2x Infusion Silicone Connectors - £6.50
2x 10m Pack of Infusion Spiral - £7.00
25m Vacuum Bagging Film - £62.50
25m Infusion Resin Infusion Mesh - £62.50
5 rolls of Vacuum Bagging Gum Tape - £19.95

List of materials for manufacturing a complete set of carbon fibre motorcycle fairings:

15m 1m Wide 200gsm Carbon Fibre Cloth - £292.50
3m 1m Wide 660gsm Carbon Fibre Cloth - £75.00
2m Lantor Soric SF 3mm - £24.32
10kgs of IN2 Epoxy Infusion Resin - £120.86

I hope this helps and wish you all the best for your project!

Matt


Matt Statham
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Sales