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(3) The real deal carbon is out of this world price wize.



I could elaborate more than this babbling, but stick with this above comment.

Take it from a car designer that has designed composite supercars cars, last 2 I worked on were on the cover of Road & Track last year. The only way it is feasible would be if you sold about 50 or more parts to get your money back of the investment.

The cost is not just the material to make the part, it's the cost to make patterns and molds. Very, very expensive (most expensive method is tooling block and carbon fiber molds, needed for high volume and quality parts). I'm guessing, but even just a couple layers of prepreg 400 GSM 2x2 twill, it'll be around $5k just for the material to make the front end without the cost of the mold and patterns. We manufacture composite parts using an autoclave, which is a vacuum, pressure, and heated controlled process that can take between 4 to 8 hours to make a part.

Ther are cheap methods to manufacturing carbon fiber parts, rather than an autoclave, it's called a wet lay-up, using an epoxy resin. This cheap wet lay-up process does not have the same stiffness as parts make in an autoclave. Sort of like laying up fibreglass. The problem with wet lay-ups is that the material doesn't consolidate, it's not cured under pressure like prepreg autoclaved parts, has a crappy finish, lots of porisity, and you still need to make a mold, which can be made out of fibreglass. This cheap process would still probably cost several thousand, and in the end you have heavy wet lay-up carbon parts that doesn't have much of a structural advantage over fibreglass.

I can go on and on regarding this subject... any questions about it, let me know. The company I work at has been doing this for a long time, heck even all the Lemans winning Dodge Viper GTS-R carbon fibre body parts were done by our shop for Oreca, along with Daytona Prototype cars, FIA F1, GT2/3, and all sorts of supercars and race boats, etc...

Cheers,
Mike