Best way to larger body panels?

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Pustil	Pustil posted 9 Years Ago HOT Topic Details
Group: Forum Members Posts: 7, Visits: 155	Hi guys! My friend is building 400+ HP Alfa 156 and wants carbon fibre bonnet, but in Czech republic is impossible to find larger carbon fabric than 1,2m wide and that's not enough. So I want to ask you. What's the best way to made some big parts? Is it possible to connect 2 fabrics together in a center of part with some good looking finish? Or It's better to buy wider fabric and pay a lot of money for shipping from UK to Czech republic? That car is really low budget (car,engine and upgrades are less than 3000 gbp) and the prize is very important, but I want to make parts good looking too. Thanks for your replies -------------------Amateur from one little garage ----------Sorry for my English ---------------------------------------------- Edited 9 Years Ago by Pustil
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Hanaldo	Hanaldo posted 9 Years Ago HOT Post Details
Group: Forum Members Posts: 2.5K, Visits: 28K	A v-joint is very simple, but tricky to pull off nicely with dry fabrics. The method is as straight forward as laying your first piece of fabric into the mould so that the visible edge is down the middle of the part. Then when you lay your second piece of fabric, you flip it over so that the weave is running 45 degrees in the opposite direction. When you lay it into the mould, you overlap the first piece of fabric by about an inch. Then you can continue the rest of the layup however you like, you don't need to do a v-joint for every layer. The trick is that dry fabric will fray and v-weave finishes only look nice with a very crisp cut edge. So if you are doing wet lay, then this can be very hard, because as you brush the resin onto the fabric you will pull some fibres and end up with a messy edge. Infusion is some what easier, you just need to be sure that the fabric don't move and pull your v-joint out of alignment. I would recommend practising this a few times before trying it on the actual bonnet. Alternatively there are other ways to make a feature of of joins in the fabric. My personal favourite is to use a strip of spread-tow fabric down the middle of the mould, and then overlap the 2 pieces of regular fabric behind that. Or a strip of Easy Composites unidirectional ribbon tape is a very easy method that can look very effective. If you were to use that method, I would recommend offsetting the join slightly so that you can do 2 strip's of the tape, ending up with a 'racing stripe' sort of look.
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