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Rough breakdown of some of the costs:
-I think I’ve put about 15 hours of my time into it in total. That doesn’t include any design or development because I haven’t done any.
-Pre-preg is between £35 and £100 per square metre and I probably spent about 2 hours cutting the triangles by hand, laminating it and bagging up. There’s probably 3-4 square meters used here taking into account the amount of scrap that would be generated.
-Autoclaves aren’t cheap. A small one is about £35k and that needs to be factored in, though a lot of carbon which doesn’t have to be highest quality is now being made out of clave.
-If there’s a proper shaped mould, this will add a few £k to the cost.
-A custom hub will also be quite expensive.Essentially, a flat disc in general purpose carbon with a foam core is not that expensive to make. Once a bit of development and moulding are factored in, the costs start to rise. Then it’s a matter of each incremental bit adding cost, like adding stiffness and lightweighting.
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Jonny69
frankenbike
Badass.
So which are the expensive parts here that results in a disc wheel costing £800? Would that sheet of carbon fibre have cost a lot had you not used off-cuts? Or is it your knowledge/skills/labour that's the expensive bit?