Different Kind Of Carbon Fiber Object

A Basic Carbon Fiber Introduction

Let’s divide it into two main categories:

Dry carbon fiber product and wet / regular carbon fiber product. Doesn’t matter the product is made for cars, bikes, toys or spaceships. All of them go under these two kinds.

Dry Carbon Fiber product normally means using Pre-preg carbon fiber sheet. The resin will be pre injected into the carbon fiber cloth. It must be kept in a -20 C ( -4 F) environment. Otherwise, it will slowly turn hard and cannot be used to form into the shape we need it to. The pre-preg carbon fiber looks like this:

From the photo above, you can see it looks a little bit…shiny, or wetter, which is caused by the resin in the material. Yes, dry carbon fiber looks wet before it is used. You can simply find any carbon fiber sheet photo or come to our shop to play with the material that doesn’t have any resin and is kept at room temperatures. They are regular /wet carbon fiber, if we inject resin into the regular carbon fber, it becomes pre-preg (Dry) carbon . There are many ways of using pre-preg carbon fiber material. All of them will squeeze in the resin as much as possible while forming the material into its shape. Those processes will force the resin out, so there will be no leftover resin on top of the product (mostly). You can simply polish the surface, then the product is finished. Compared to the process of wet or regular carbon, the resin is applied layer by layer into the mold, on top of each layer of carbon fiber, a simple vacuumed bag will not be able to get rid of all the resin, therefore each layer of carbon fiber will not attach into each other to have the physical strength. Also, there will be leftover resin on top of the product surface. You will have to polish the piece two to three times to clean the surface before applying on the final clearcoat mixed with final resin. This makes them look wet, so we call them wet carbon.

We always receive questions about how to tell the differences. Some people believe if it looks matte, it is dry carbon; if it is glossy, it is wet. While this was correct back in the days, not anymore.

Dry Carbon Product Making Method 1:

Metal (normally aluminum) Mold with high air pressure autoclave. Normally the mold and related machine looks like:

Picture 1 is the mold. Workers with enough experience will be able to: layer all the dry carbon fiber (depends on the purpose), put it into the mold, make sure the cloth is perfectly smooth, make sure all the waves are perfectly stretched or matched, then close the mold, put everything into the container in the second picture. The container will generate very high pressure and temperatures for one or more hours. Each layer of carbon will be firstly glued together because of the resin, then formed into the same shape because of the pressure, then physics will make sure the product will hold themself together. After that, it will be taken out, just like the third photo. Now is the time to glue on some clips if needed. The final finish will be like in the 4th photo, yes, it is matte, we will talk about it later.

Dry Carbon Product Making Method #2:

There is another way that doesn’t need the huge container. Pre-preg carbon fiber will be laid into the mold just like the method one, but then a machine will put it on the other side of the mold, heat up the entire thing while pushing them together with lots of force. After a while, the machine will open the mold and the product can be taken out to do further work. This is like the method used by BMW on their carbon fiber roofs. The main difference is they have a pre-form and reinject resin process before it is placed into the real mold for the baking process. Their production looks a lot more advanced mainly with robots because they are BMW. Here is a video:

BMW roof production, the BMW factory did mostly everything with machines, we do most of the process by hand because we are only making one single product at a time. The outcomes are similar, just robot factories have better efficiency.

Dry Carbon Product Making Method #3:

The 3rd method is also an alternative to method 1 and 2. You can see from the video, it’s relatively hard to form a much more complex object, or to form multiple pieces together into one single product with such a large, single direction pressure process. For a multi-surface, multi-element product, a set of molds combined is the only solution.

You can see the mold in the first photo, they are multiple pieces forced together in all kinds of directions to use method #2 solution. but they are extremely heavy. Thanks to modern technology, we now can use a special form of epoxy that is much stronger than traditional formulas to form the mold. They are still much lighter than metal, but you will need a vacuum bag just like wet carbon to help form the shape of the carbon fiber, no matter metal mold or epoxy mold, you do need a tube to push out the air in the resin, or you will see small bubbles. For smaller products, a smaller autoclave can be used like in photo 4.

CFRP Method

CFRP stands for Carbon Fiber Reinforced plastic. Basically, you wrap the carbon fiber sheet on top of the plastic part. A plastic part is much easier to make with perfect fitment because they are soft. Use of carbon fiber on top of the plastic part will allow the part to have the strength of carbon fiber while its shape stays the same with plastic to have the best fitment. Another benefit is that plastic clips will make the installation work much easier since the carbon fiber will be very hard to bend. Both pre-preg carbon fiber and wet carbon processes can be used to do CFRP. Wet carbon only needs a vacuum bag, but the dry carbon needs to go into the autoclave.

Both the first and the second photo are dry carbon CFRP. The first one is exposed carbon fiber. You can touch it, scratch it (it’s 6 times stronger than regular metal so it will damage the key if you try hard), and will be perfectly fit, just without top coating. The second photo is not as strong as the first one plus you cannot scratch it. The top coating is much softer than the carbon fiber, but it has UV protection and shinny finish.

Matte and Glossy Finish

There is glossy dry carbon fiber part shown in matte and/or no coating finish dry carbon as well. It is not hard to tell that the finish of it is totally dependent on the top finish coating. You can always choose to have a glossy finish coating or matte finish coating. Matte is a bit more expensive as you cannot polish the coat. If there were any mistakes, the entire thing needs to be redone again. We can also make color top finish by mixing color with the resin (you can paint on top as well, but we choose to do it with resin). So, it doesn’t really matter what kind of carbon is used, feel free to choose any kind of finish. The dry carbon is lighter and stronger, the wet or regular carbon is weaker but cheaper, because all it needs is just a standard epoxy mold with a vacuum bag.

Pictures below is 1: Dry Carbon Glossy Finish Aluminum Mold 991 GT3 Rs Style Hood. 2: The matte finish on the back side. 3: The Matte Finish R32 Regular Carbon Door, 4: The Regular Carbon / Wet Carbon in the mold.

In the end, guess what kind of carbon fiber is this?

Don’t google it, just commend below.