Carbon Fiber Products
The camera doesn’t really do these pieces justice (my cheapo digital that is covered in resin coupled with fluorescent lights in the warehouse). The look like a bright red and blue, but in person they are more of a deep, subtle color. Once I add the resin, they will darken up a bit as well.
I’ll continue to post pictures of these sets as I run through the production stages.
Working on 20oz 2×2 twill cabrio set right now so I figured I’d post up some pics of it. The front door pieces are insanely long, almost as big as the A8 door pieces.
Unfortunately, cabrio core sets of trim are a little tough to come by. The original core that was sent to me was from the UK, and was a right hand drive set. Thankfully we were still able to use all the pieces except for the two dash pieces. We had to order new ones, so the dash pieces are a little bit behind the rest of the set.
We’ve done a few B8 A4/S4 carbon fiber sets of trim so far, but up until now they have all been the standard 11oz 2×2 twill (you can see some of those sets in the B8 gallery).
We recently got a bunch of B8 cores from Germany so we figured it would be time to start getting a little more custom with some of them. I’m hoping to have these sets trimmed and sanded smooth sometime next week so I can clearcoat them. I’ll post more pictures as I make further progress on them.
First is the 20oz 2×2 twill. This is the same fabric found on the B7 RS4 OEM carbon fiber trim. The weave is twice as thick as the standard 11oz 2×2 twill. I’ve done some blog posts comparing the 20oz and 11oz in the past. Side by side it becomes apparent how much nicer the 20oz is.
Few close ups of the 20oz.
Up next we have a harness satin weave, known as 8HS. I believe this fabric is very similar to the B8 OEM carbon fiber trim.
Up close you can see how tight the weave is.
Few more shots of the 8HS.
Lastly we have another harness satin weave, but this time it is a 5HS. It is basically the same thing as the 8HS but with thicker bunches of fiber.
Few close ups of the 5HS.
Lastly we have some B5 pics of the 8HS. We’re also currently working on a B6/B7 set with the 5HS. Hopefully I can post some updates on these sets soon.
Sorry if this is a bit of a boring post, but it should have a pretty big impact on the photos we have here in the blog. When we moved into the shop last year, it was outfitted with some super cheap florescent light bulbs. These bulbs were a problem for a couple of reasons. The biggest problem was cheap florescent bulbs make paint correction (wetsanding and polishing) extremely difficult. If you’ve ever seen a high end detailer work on a car, often he’ll use a “sun gun” on spots to replicate daylight as florescent lights can trick your eyes and not show some imperfections and exaggerate others.
I’d have to polish a piece and step outside in natural light to see the what the piece looked like in daylight to catch all the imperfections. Obviously this meant I could only polish during certain hours and took up quite a bit of extra time stepping in and out of the shop to eyeball the pieces.
The other problem was the photos I took for the blog.
Under the old bulbs, no matter what settings I used on the camera, they always turned up with an ugly yellow hue. I’d have to adjust the colors in Photoshop. This meant a lot of the time the colors in the photos weren’t always fully accurate. We’d also get some weird reflection lines and some haziness that can’t be seen on the pieces in person.
These next two are completely untouched (they are resized and watermarked) photos of the same pieces under the new bulbs. As you can see there is a drastic difference in the end result. Now I just need to get a decent camera so I can start taking better photos.
Few pics of the first of many pieces for Coran’s B6 A4.
First up are the seatbacks. These are all cleaned up and ready for clearcoat. I’ll be dropping them off at a bodyshop to be clearcoated later this week. They are just too big for me to handle the clearcoating on my own and need to be done by a professional.
Close up of the groove in the seatback.
These last few pics are of the airbag covers located in the seats. They just need to be wetsanded and polished and will be ready to go.
I’ve got a bunch more parts being made for Coran. You can check out the progress of his car in this thread over on Audizine.
