Quote:
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Originally Posted by Topless
Jim,
Did you rip off Wiki without giving them credit?? Shame on you!
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Hi,
No I didn't. Someone else PM'd me about Chico's (? or whatever his name is) post, seemingly jabbing me. I didn't see it since his
contributions are hidden to me. Guy must be
cyber-stalking me, disecting everything I write, I dunno - his prob, not mine, I'm not concerned with what
he does.
I took my post from my own notes. I've been working with CF since I was studying for my degree in Materials Science back in the '70's. Back then, there were probably fewer than 1000 people who even knew what it was.
You see, I had a small
business with a partner producing cosmetic CF parts for the Lotus Esprit. I met my partner, a fellow Esprit owner, at a Nat'l. Lotus convention we both attended. We had similar science/engineering backgrounds and decided to see if we could make up some parts. That's when we contributed to the article in Wikipedia back in '05. We made contributions to the articles on Carbon Nanotubes and Pyrolysis also - this isn't the only forum I contribute to.
He was actually working for a company and had access to some mold making equipment, including a CNC. I spec'd the pieces, produced 3D CAD drawings and my partner would use these to produce a mold and lay up the piece. We made a few sample pieces, but found that using the
painted or
wet method produced too many rejects from air bubbles, even when vacuum bagged.
We then started making the pieces from prepreg cloth and autoclaving them. These turned out so well that our reject rate came down from 50% to under 4%. So, we started making them to order. We produced about 1000 various pieces in total. But, since we used this expensive production method, we could not really afford to continue (at a price people were willing to pay, and we sold at near our cost) since we could not reach any economy of scale without making a sizeable investment in equipment and we didn't feel the market (both demand estimates as well as competition from firms already doing this work) warranted such a gamble. But, we had a good time, learned a great deal, made several new good friends, and came out pretty much even.
I'd actually forgotten about this submission to Wiki until I broke out my notes for the current thread. Guess I don't feel the need to footnote an article I co-authored...
Happy Motoring!... Jim'99