I have been looking online to see if i can find any information on how cf car wheels are made.
1st thing i came up with: rims are filament wound.
I am guessing the cosmetic outer layer is bonded on after the wheel is made?
Also in this photo how do you suppose they made the lip and or joined it to the filament wound section?
interesting for sure.
i’d be hard pressed to trust anyone to remove/mount a set of tires on them though…
Nice piece of art. I guess the rim is basicly a tube. What kind of fiber did they use? It looks like a cut up piece of biaxial?
The visible part has a piece of woven carbon on it. I guess it is all prepreg, so they could have applied it on the mould before winding.
2 things still: The spokes are bolted on. Of course this is not ideal, but seemingly it works.
Second, contradicting point 1, is that when braking, enormous amounts of heat are generated, and dissipated through the wheel. The wheel acts as a heatsink.
I have been supplying a Dutch company making truck wheels (50 lbs for a double-width wheel, a so-called “super single”). Their biggest problem was the heat. They used a $30/lbs epoxy resin to infuse the wheel, with a Tg of over 175 degrees C, but that was not enough. Brakes generated some 520 degrees C after 2 emergency brakes one after the other.
just finished is the “Superbus” which is a bus, capable of doing 250 km/h (150 mph) also with composite wheels. I warned them for the effects of an emergency stop, but we will see. (for now there is hardly any road that can house the thing. 12 meters long, ground clearance of 3" tops.)
My guess is that these wheels for now are more show pieces than for racing.
The company I work for has been making carbon drag wheels for a while now as well as a number of other wheel projects along the line of truck wheels. We have a spoked design that helps with the heat problem a bit and we use prepreg which helps. Also the heat built up in cars is much less than larger vehicles.
A mate of mine started Carbon Revolution, who are supplying Shelby Super cars one piece carbon wheels.http://www.carbonrev.com/
As a side note: It seems that everybody has made the first set of carbon wheels too. We did our 1st set in 2004, Chalmers FSAE team did theirs in 2004 or 05.
Moke…no I was the first to invent and make the carbon fiber wheel 
jk.
Possibly carbon racing brake rotors help with heat?
Aren’t there resins available that can be post cured at 750F? Would that be sufficient for a carbon fiber wheel? This certaily isn’t something my shop would tackle. We just aren’t geared up for much structural composites… besides maybe a honeycomb panel or core/cf panel or small brackets.
^^ tell your friend to be aware of this aftermarket/oem’r apparently
he doesn’t pay his bills.
Extending enormous amounts of credit in this economy borders on foolish.
http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20091230/NEWS02/912300373/1003/NEWS02
I’ve heard similar stories of a major aftermarketer named Hen…y.
The Shelby in the article is Carroll Shelby as in AC Cobras, Ford etc; Shelby Super Cars is Jerod Shelby as in Ultimate Aero. They’re not related.
Ahhh ok. I though Carroll shelby was the one who made the shelby supercar. my bad.
Same, must get real annoying.