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Hi everyone,
As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.
When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.
Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.
Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.
Thanks for your patience and support!
Short roll of carbon fiber showed up on door step today...
- Thread starter ascribner
- Start date
ascribner
Husqvarna
AA Class
So... are you now making parts as a side business?
(you forgot to resize the pics again)
I am making parts for my bike. These are one-off pieces that I am making with a "lost mold" process. Easy and quick. For what these sell for in comparison with my day job, selling these is honestly not worth my time. I do it because I enjoy building stuff.
(I did not forget, I'm just lazy at the moment :-P). I share these links with friends and do not want to make them register to see the pics, which they do if I attach them to the post.
ray_ray
Mini-Sponsor
Looks good and what is the process of making these parts out of this fiber?
ascribner
Husqvarna
AA Class
I will describe the process. If there are truly enough people on this site interested in how to make some custom, one-off heat shields, then I will do a write-up. This whole process will take me less than two hours.
Create the shape you want around the pipe. The easiest way I found to do this is is to take a 4" pool noodle and cut it in half.
Zip tie the pool noodle to the pipe firmly so it does not move, but not too tight that it completely deforms the noodle.
Duct tape is your best friend -- even epoxy resin will not bond to duct tape. Take duct tape and cover the noodle horizontally (parallel to the ground) from top to bottom.
First, make this out of fiberglass. Take some vacuum bagging material (resin does not stick to this. Cut your fabric to the size you need, I used 6 layers of 5.7oz. Pre-impregnate the cloth with the correct amount of resin. Let the resin sit until it reaches a B-stage (still curing, still a little bit tacky, but no longer "wet").
Form the B-stage fabric over the pool noodle.
Peel off the bagging material.
Make any final adjustments and let it cure.
Trim the piece to final fit.
Sand the surface smooth and flat.
(I used an orbital sander for trimming and sanding)
Clean the surface with acetone (wearing gloves as you do not want this to contact your skin -- on that note, ALWAYS wear gloves -- as a note, if working with resin, do not clean your hands with acetone, acetone immediately dissolves the resin, but is also highly absorbed through the dermis and you run the risk of having the resins directly absorbed into your body -- you have been warned.)
Cut your carbon fiber to size and laminate the surface with a layer of carbon.
Let the resin B-stage and spray it with a couple heavy coats of clear (this bonds the clear coat to the still curing resin with no further prep needed).
Allowed it to finish curing.
Cut, trim and polish.
Done.
