Talk Composites - The Forum for Advanced Composites

Bicycle frame

http://www.talkcomposites.com/Topic380.aspx

By titch16 - 1/30/2012 1:12:24 PM

I'm planning to build a bicycle frame using a mixture of Carbon tubes, fabric and aluminium.
I will need to bond the aluminium to the carbon but I'm not too sure how I would do that. And also I will need to join carbon tubes together. 

I don't know what I will need to buy to do all this. I want to use a 12k weave as the surface layer. What else will I need?
By brummelisa - 3/24/2012 6:40:09 AM

Kylle,

Since I have only tested a plug I know the pro and cons with that.
And with a plug I mean that you make the piece you want first in extruded polystyrene (you use it in when you build houses).
You can cut it with a hot wire (I made mine from a guitar-coard (correct word?) and used a car-battery-charger.
It's like cutting cheese. The only tough part is that you have to have some sort of guideline that you cut after.
Then you simply wrap the piece with CF and you are ready to go. If you want to remove the polystyrene you just simply poor acetone and it will melt.

You don't make the whole monocoque in one piece, but you have to glue them together and that can be a bit tricky, but is not that hard. 

This guy used the above technique
http://theprojectjunkie.com/composite-bicycles/homemade-carbon-fiber-bike-project.html

You can naturally also create a mould, but I felt that it's too hard work for me to make one and specially since I will only make one bike, I felt
that it was too much labor. But I think the end-result would be much easier to put together if you use a mould.

Thanks for the geometry. When I decided to start my bike, the P5 was just announced and I thought it was so beautiful that I decided to copy it.
I was lucky that the geometry was posted at Cervelo's webpage and I could grab some photos that I could measure from (and it was easy to make it correct since I could have the geometry as guide so I knew how much I had to increase the photo to make it 1:1

Please ask me any more questions you have.

I have included a photo of the seattube just to let you know how I included my seatpost-holder.
I wrapped some CF around my seatpost and then I glued it into my polystyrene and after that I wrapped some more layers around it.

http://www.talkcomposites.com/Uploads/Images/8d722474-d48a-417a-8317-2e2b.jpg