By my count I have about 25 A4/S4 vent and MMI sets of cores, and close to 10 A5/S5 sets as well, so hopefully after this group buy is completed I’ll have plenty of cores at my disposal to continue making these matching carbon fiber pieces.

Alex @ Europrice took care of our pretty big order of cores and once again, was awesome to work with (can’t recommend him enough for sourcing OEM parts).

Also made sure I had plenty of the matching fabric in stock so I could get started on these right away.

Keep an eye on the blog and the forums for updates on how these pieces are coming along.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on various improvements to help with the production of the B8 “OEM” carbon fiber vent and MMI pieces.  I spent the last day or so making simple foam molds that help support the pieces under vacuum.  Previous brackets would cave in under full vacuum.  Running the pump at half vacuum meant sometimes the edges of carbon fiber wouldn’t be totally conformed around the part because the seal wasn’t as tight as it could be.  After having to redo a few pieces, I decided it was time to make some molds.

To make our foam mold, I’m going to use a pour foam.  It is very similar to the expanding insulating/sealing foam sold in cans at the hardware store.  It comes in two parts, and you mix them 1:1 to start making your foam.

For demonstration purposes, I’ll do a small test run first with 1oz of each of the materials.

After 60 seconds of mixing, the foam turns from dark brown to a light brown and starts to thicken up.

15 seconds later and the expansion starts

Within 2 minuets the foam has engulfed the cup.

The foam also emits a massive amount of heat.

5 minutes later and the foam is sold.

As you can see I’ve had a bit of fun testing out various mixing techniques and amounts to try to get a solid foam that I was happy with.

Time to get serious with our MMI mold.  I lay plastic wrap in the oven tray so that the foam doesn’t stick to it.

The B8 S5 MMI piece gets the same treatment.

A 1:1 mixture, this time 12 total ounces.

You really have to whip it quickly, as it starts to start foaming within a minute or two.

Once its ready, pour the mixture over the part.

Same rapid expansion as before, just on a bigger scale.

I want to compact the foam a little bit to ensure that it fills in all the gaps around the part, so I place some plastic wrap on top of the foam and pat it down a bit.

This one gets up to 160F.

A couple of minutes later, the foam is hard and ready to be popped out.

Now comes the fun part of shaping the mold, this time with a B8 S4 piece that was made earlier in the day and is a little more firm.

After picking off the foam around the top of the part, I slowly sand away at the bottom edge, making enough room for the fabric to wrap all the way around,

Next I start to cut away at the speedometer area, picking out large chunks.

Then going back for more detailed work and cleaning it up a bit.

Finally started to look respectable.

Same treatment for the inside.  I have to remove this inside area because the fabric needs to wrap all the way around the edges of the long skinny parts.

All done.  It’s not pretty, but it works perfectly.

After placing the mold, along with the piece wrapped in fiber in the bag, the edges are carefully sealed.

After the pump is turned on, all of the air is removed and the fabric is perfectly contoured to all the complexities of the part.

Won’t be long now…

We’ve made a bunch of progress on these pieces in the last week or so.

First and foremost, we got the bag system running multiple parts now.  We’ve also made an upgrade to the molds that I’ll detail in a separate post because it is a neat little process.

We’ve also had to deal with stubborn vacuum pumps.  We have a few of them, and none of them like to run at anything less than full vacuum.  Unfortunately, these B8 vent and MMI pieces are made of flimsy plastic and anything over 5psi starts to make the parts contort inward on themselves.  So, we have to run the pumps at about half vacuum (via a pressure valve at the mouth of the vacuum bag).  The pumps get angry about this and spit out oil and smoke.  Previously this meant dealing with a smokey shop when the pump was running, but I fashioned this ghetto exhaust out of PVC tubing to allow the smoke to vent under our bay door.  If you look closely at the bottom of the tubing you can see where a bunch of light yellow oil has collected.

On to the good stuff.  You can see here the fist few pieces out of the bags that have full epoxy on them.  These pieces are a day or so away from being cured enough to be put into our oven.  Once in the oven they’ll be baked for 36 hours or so to improve the strength and complete the cure.  After that, the excess fiber will be trimmed off, they’ll be sanded smooth, and sprayed with several layers of clearcoat.

More pics of these pieces in a few days after they get cleaned up.

We just started our first official set of BMW carbon fiber trim.  It’s for a 2006 e90 325i sedan.  We decided to wrap it in an upgraded 20oz 2×2 twill fabric to make sure the trim really stood out.  Once this is done we’ll start an e92 set (hopefully from an M3) and it will get the same treatment.  Stay tuned for more details and pricing…

First we took the stock wood set, sanded it down to make room for the carbon fiber, and added a coat of bonding epoxy.

Once the epoxy had firmed up a bit, we began to wrap the pieces in the 20oz 2×2 twill fabric.

Next comes the long process of slowly building up the epoxy on the surface to give the pieces depth.

That’s all for now.  I’ll post more pictures after the epoxy has cured and the pieces have been trimmed, sanded, and cleaned up for clearcoat.