Handmade Carbon Fiber Bicycle Project

Hi there, I thought I share with you this post about how I made my handmade bicycle out of Carbon Fiber. I finished this project about 5 years ago, but I just posted it online on my Behance. Let me know what you think! :slight_smile:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/43223229/Handmade-TT-Bicycle-Project-(Carbon-Fiber)

I like it.

Are you confident with durability with the joint connections? Seems fine after your inaugural ride, but how is it holding up?

Is the seat clamp a separate part you attached?

Instead of the sun, could you have used just a plain oven in your kitchen for curing?

I also like the paint. I understand you tapered the color to land just above the seat stays, but for me it makes a tension point. I am left wondering what it would look like if you didn’t taper the "stripe"and the color goes across the stays too.

Great project! Thanks for sharing. Too few students take the time and patience to really learn and work with different materials which makes them completely oblivious to how to actually design for those materials. Most think that applying a Carbon fiber shader in Keyshot is a good enough reason for saying something is made out of CF.

I’m sure you have a much, much greater understanding of the work and materials that went into your design and that will be very valuable for you. Cool stuff.

Hi guys, thank you for the kind words.
Iab - I made the joints really beefy. The CF thickness is more than the industry standards, just to make sure if I made any errors, it would still hold up. It has been about 4 years that I have used this bike and it is still pretty strong. The seat clamp is taken from a Cervelo P series, and glued on top of seat tube. For the CF, you could even have it indoors. It will take longer depending on the temperature in the room to cure, but the process of curing is a chemical process, so the resin will create heat on its own as it is mixed with the hardener. Heat from other sources such as sun or an oven only speeds up the process. It also depends on the type of resin that you are using. I might repaint the bicycle again, next time I am thinking of maybe using a lighter color like silver or white.

Cyberdemon - Exactly, working with materials and actually building something teaches a lot about the characteristics of that particular material. It is just not as easy as it seems, so the gained experience will help the designer to understand the process more and maybe apply that knowledge to future projects. Thanks a lot :slight_smile: