Carbon Fiber Violin- using prepregs

General Composites Discussions Products Talk
#1

Well, Hello everyone.
I’ve been working on a carbon fiber violin for awhile now and thought I would check out this site and share some of the stuff I have managed to get done.
This is weird, apparently I don’t know enough about computers to get the image to show up, damn.
Ok, I’ll try this.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/156894760/violin-carbon-fiber-engineering-and-tooling?ref=city

Here, at least, is the site where stuff works…images and a short video too.
Please ignore the $ content of my page, Just wanted to share some of the stuff I have been working on and possibly to expand my knowledge base by sharing it with community.
regards,

#2

That’s way cool! Don’t let yourself get discouraged, as your project is very worthwhile. I’m glad to see a young person take a passionate interest in making fine instruments, especially violins, especially carbon. I wouldn’t worry about aluminum molds right away. MDF or high density tooling board for your initial set of plugs might serve you better in terms of cost. High grade finishes are easily achieved, and you can build an oven for final cures. Inevitably changes will be made to fine tune(no pun intended) your design and the cost of an unusable aluminum mold will be hard to swallow. Do you have cad drawings yet? If not, that’s what I would be developing in the near term. By the way, I loved the music in the background in your video…very nice!

Jon

#3

Ditto. If you’re worried about the mold distorting or not having a vacuum tight surface you can always envelope bag to equalize the loads on the mold and then use simple fixtures on the outside to hold everything in place during cure.

And don’t think you have to go with a fancy heated mold either. A simple temperature controlled oven made from foil backed foam will work just fine.

All that to say that you’re really close- don’t let funding get in the way of success.

#4

Thanks for the encouragement, I appreciate it.

The next step, of course, is to start the CAD files; which I won’t be doing myself. I have a friend that is a tool and die maker and does prototype work. Most people I know personally haven’t really followed my thought process for the tooling, but he knew exactly what I wanted.
It is going to be a fairly complex piece of tooling and I am excited to move forward with it.

All the best

#5

It’s good you have someone close that is well versed in cad cam and tooling. As I’m sure you are already aware, this is so involved you could easily get caught up in a couple more years of development if you were to aspire to conquer this aspect of manufacture yourself from scratch. This way half your battle is done!

Jon