Carbon Fiber

[bucketsofgs1000]

I just finished re-touching my carbon fiber GS1000 body work. I'm replacing the float needles and seats in the carbs and the head gasket, then putting this machine back on the road for me to ride, and back up for sale if someone else wants to ride.

[bucketsofgs1000]

Front Fender

Here is a picture of the front fender

[bucketsofgs1000]

Tail section

Here is the tail section...

[bucketsofgs1000]

And the side covers

Here is one side cover... the other looks an awful lot like it.

[tone]

Thats a very nicely done piece of laminating fella, very impressed as i know what a pita carbon can be

[GSexpress]

Carbon Fiber

I just finished re-touching my carbon fiber GS1000 body work. I'm replacing the float needles and seats in the carbs and the head gasket, then putting this machine back on the road for me to ride, and back up for sale if someone else wants to ride.

HEY! You gonna make some for us?????????




PLEASE?????

[80GS750]

ok, that looks killer!!!!!

i gotta do that to my bike, i dont care if i copy you or not...

teach us how, teach us how......

im a big do it yourselfer

[bucketsofgs1000]

How to overlay parts...

Here's what I did. There are many other (some much better) ways to do similar work with carbon:

First, I sanded, bondoed, glazed, finish sanded, and primed everything black.
Next, I cut out patterns for the carbon from paper to check the fit.
I then cut the carbon, made up some vacuum bags, and gathered up everything I needed for each layup. My parts are just overlays (not straight carbon parts).

You will need a vacuum pump, vacuum bagging materials and tape, hoses, carbon fiber, and epoxy. I used some laminating resin that my friend had (he is the one who helped me do the layups).

I painted the resin all over each part (one at a time), layed up the carbon, painted more resin on top, slipped the whole in thing into a vacuum bag and pulled vacuum on the assembly for a couple hours while the resin set up. Unfortunately I left my mechanical engineering degree at home the day I did the tank and bagged the WHOLE tank without a vent to atmospheric... and what do you know the thing imploded...OOPS. My friends had quite a laugh at that one.

I ended up quickly cutting a vent into the inside of the tank so air could get in and I put a compressed air line in to inflate the tank back to shape, sort of. After the carbon set up I re-sanded and bondoed and primed and started over. The second time went a little smoother since I remembered to vent it to atmosphere. That is one of those mistakes most people learn from and never make again. Unlike most people I can say that my tank has been pressured tested to 110 psi internal pressure (luckily it did not split a seam in the process).

Once I completed all the overlays the real work started. I de-bagged the parts, cleaned off the worst of the prickles with some acetone while the resin was young and could be disolved fairly easily and then started prepping for paint.

I sprayed about six coats of Dupont Chromaclear HC-7600S clear coat over the carbon, but because the carbon was overlayed the texture of it was showing. I sanded as smooth as it would get without cutting into the carbon and then re-sprayed the whole thing (about a week ago) with two more coats. I had to then go back and sand down all the high spots in the clear working from 220 (for the runs I got when spraying... that sucked) to 400, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000 grit sand paper, followed by rubbing compound, scratch remover, and finally waxing the paint. And now I have some decent looking carbon fiber overlayed parts.

It sounds pretty straight forward and if you have experience working with composites it is. Getting all the equipment in one place to do the work is tough and expensive but my friend who helped me had some of the things I did not so that was a big help.

I started this project over a year ago while I was rebuilding the whole bike and after I sprayed the initial six coats of clear I stopped work on the body work and put the bike together so I could ride it. I later found out what those silly looking o-ring/washer things were for in the engine gasket set when my head gasket had oil everywhere between it, the head, the pistons, and the cylinder casting. Since I had to pull the tank off to replace the head gasket, I decided to finish the last couple things I hadn't rebuilt on the bike: the float needle valves and seats, and the final sanding an clear on the body work. That brings me to today when I finally finished the clear coat work. Personally I think the body work could use another shot of clear and another final sanding job, but for now (especially since I'm considering selling the machine) I am happy with it.

As a side note, there was a recent post about doing high-end painting at home. I painted that clear coat on the roof of my garage using a $50 paint gun on my home compressor on a nice sunny day. I think it came out fairly well too. The clear I used is a two part urethane clear that gets mixed 4:1 and flashes between coats in 3-5 minutes.

Hope that helps explain HOW I did it. Good luck to anyone that repeats my efforts and if you have questions, feel free to PM me or post the questions. Take care,

-Zack

[80GS750]

wow.... thats really cool man

i have done a lot of fiberglassing but never tried carbon... and never had to worry about how it lays down cause i always overcoat and paint my stuff.....

i would love to try something like this but i dont know anything about the bagging and vacuuming parts of this...

can you use a regular vacuum for the sucking? what do you use for bags? how do you keep the carbon all in place while moving it around and does it shift when you apply vacuum to it???

thanks for the info man, and sweet job

hey if you wanna sell the pieces ill trade you my painted stuff for your overlayed stuff!!!!!! lol

-nate

[bucketsofgs1000]

You may be able to use a regular vacuum for it, if there is enough suck on the machine. A vacuum pump will pull down to the 1-5 torr level (~28 inHg vacuum) whereas I doubt a vacuum cleaner could do much more than about 5inHg. But, the layup resins take about 4 hours to set up to the point you can de-bag the part, so you would have to run your vacuum for all that time (pretty obnoxious noise I would think). I used vacuum bagging film which you can buy from boat supply stores, but I have certainly heard of people using heavy duty trash bags with good success. The only down side to that is you can't see through the bag unless you find heavy clear bags. And yes, the carbon does move around when you pull it down. You need to be very carful putting it into the bag and you need to use all six of your hands to help keep all the edges in place while the bag is sucking down. You can always break the vacuum and reposition stuff and you can reposition stuff with the vacuum going, but you definitely want to get all the creases out of the bag othewise you will have ridges of resin to sand out later (I had a few of those). If you want to see some pictures of the process look up boat building and vacuum bagging on the net. Good luck if you end up trying any of this. If I did it all over, I would build molds and make actual carbon fiber parts rather than overlaying the original parts. But it was a very cool learning experience anyway.

[ThAzKat]

that looks so awesome, I have always wanted to get into doing carbon fiber.

[Headphase]

company I work for, all we do is research composite materials and processes.
If you want some good info on composites try the works site.

http://www.netcomposites.com

I'd make some carbon fibre bits, but I hate the sight of the stuff (no offence c/f lovers).

[jwhelan65]

Carbon

I would love to see some pics of this all assembled...great job!!