Carbon Fibre: What is it good for?

[Graham]

I quite fancy fitting some carbon fibre body parts to my scooter...
I really like to idea of saving weight, was thinking engine/flywheel cowlings, rear mudgaurd, front mudguard.
Does anybody know if that would be a significant saving?
I would also consider panels but would need a hole cut for the carb, can this be done?
Finally there seem to be various suppliers, anybody got experience of the quality/fit of the parts out there ?

[shocky]

ive had some on a lammy all the holes split after about 1 yr and ithe gel coat started to crack up on alot of the edges mine came from PM tuning , if you only do a few miles a year then go for it if you do loads and strip it often for maintanance then id say not

[Maz]

If you are not already 10 stone, just loose some weight and save your money!

[Graham]

13 stone and not much prospect of getting lighter.
100mph advertise that they have made significant weight savings on thier dealer specials (full body).
Any idea how?

[shocky]

lots of drilling and cutting

[soulsurfer]

They will save weight but the quality is extremely poor. I have some engine cowls and rear mudguard but when you compare them to the Jap bike after market carbon, the quality becomes evident. The Lambretta body panels are shocking IMO and poorly finished.

[100mphlambrettaclub]

13 stone and not much prospect of getting lighter.
100mph advertise that they have made significant weight savings on thier dealer specials (full body).
Any idea how?

Several ways of getting rid of weight were done by removing parts that wern,t nessecary,replacing parts with lighter and sometimes stonger materials and finally as picked up cutting and drilling certain parts.One note here though no weight or drilling was removed from stress related areas. All the ideas of weight removal came from the sprint bike which was tried and tested. If you take this route be very careful and i would recomend advice before doing so. As for carbon fibre i went down this route but stopped using it. Often it would crack and feather on the edges also the cowlings perpetually came loose. Weight saving is a great device in performance if done correctly, hope this helps.

[Dazza]

But where do you strap your tent and sleeping bag??

[oldbiker]

I recently bought some carbon fiber from glassplys in southport  to repair some of the plastics on my bike. (They sell everything connected with glass fiber, carbon fiber and kevlar)

what I did was put some araldite over the cracked and damaged ares then placed a piece of the carbon fiber over the damaged area. and pressed it in to position so that the fibers became impregnated with the araldite, then covered it with a loose piece of cling film and continued to press the carbon fiber and araldite to remove any air bubbles.Left it for about 15 hours, for the araldite to set, removed the cling film and filed or sanded the carbon fiber and araldite mixture ready for painting,  It`s an expensive way of making a repaire to plastic but its very strong.

I have used carbon fiber with super glue to repair a few small items often getting stuck to what I was repairing. then filing the repair to make it look tidy.

carbon fiber is extremely strong under tension, the limiting factor tends to be the resin used, I have seen photos of con rods made from carbon fiber but I would hesitate to try that myself.

the resins normaly used for fiberglass and carbon fiber will not stick to most plastics, but will stick to steel.

Araldite sticks to just about anything except polythene, pollypropoline and teflon (ptfe)
---------------------------------------
if any body wants some woven carbon fiber I have about 1 meter square left over, that I will sell for £20 PM if interseted

sorry the carbon fiber has now found a new home..