Here it is then folks, a professional video tutorial from the Easy Composites team, this time on composites pattern making. We'll give you a step-by-step process that can be followed to enable you to reliably produce dimensionally accurate and well finished glossy patterns for any design idea that you have.

We use a new design for a carbon fibre airbox (a product we actually need for our demo car!) and show taking a 3D CAD design, printing out templates from it and making the basic shape from foam before coating it and finishing it. We know that pattern making can be pretty daunting and I really hope this video shows that if you take your time and have a good process to follow it should not be anything to worry about!



As with all our recent videos this is shot (and best appreciated) in full HD which is far more effective at 'putting you in the room' than watching the low res version so please link through to the Pattern Making Video Tutorial page and change your YouTube settings to 1080p to appreciate it at its best.

If you have any questions at all about the process then please post your questions here where myself, Paul or Warren would be very pleased to answer your questions.

Matt Statham
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Sales

Great video once again!

Hi Matthieu,

Thank you, nice to talk to you again.

You're quite right that side projections onto a solid foam block is an alternative method however what this technique would not do is give you the all-important round profiles of the inlet mouth for example, or any of the detail for the internal scoops (on the top or the bottom). For a more simple shape this would often be the way to go, for a shape like ours then we made a choice to go with the extra detail and reference accuracy that the profile skeleton provides and for something more complicated yet then we would certainly choose the profile skeleton method as often a lot of important detail would be lost if we only had basic projections.

All the best, Matt


Matt Statham
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Sales

Another great tutorial from EC, looking forward the the split mould video.

I'm making something similar myself. Are you going to do a 'how to' for the finished airbox?

One addition (which may be useful on all your tutorials) would be an estimate of time taken for each stage.  Perhaps you could say a novice would take XX hours, intermediate XX hours, experienced XX hours.  It was the estimate of time in the polishing phase that made me think of this. 

There is clearly a significant investment of time in making something like this and I know I have fallen foul of rushing jobs in the past.

Robski, the aim with this series is to take the airbox to completion and making the finished airbox using the moulds we will create as the video series progresses.

FLD good point on timings. However it may be hard to estimate how long a novice might take (we are all different). We could certainly add up the hours spent doing each stage of the project to give customers a reasonable idea.

Warren Penalver
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Support Assistant

Looks like you got a really nice piece o kit out of that process! Great stuff, will be attempting something like this. Good description too, looking forward to follow-up video on this!

cheers

Great video ,

Given me  more confidence to tackle some  one off parts for my build that I was reluctant to have a go at

but this video has put all my doubts to one side,

I will be popping in for some  stock soon.

Cheers Daz,

Hello!