I can understand why. Making something from carbon is fundamentally different from making it from steel or even ali given the nature of the material. If you just copy the design but make it from carbon instead then it's very unlikely to work well. I've done a fair bit of work with carbon myself, both wet lay-up and pre-preg (vacuum-bagged in a home-made curing oven) and the only way of making a Brompton-esque frame from carbon would involve high pressure moulds. That would require either an autoclave or inflatable internal bladders, and even a simple mould (machined from a large block of aluminium billet) would cost tens of thousands to produce. Making the fixtures like the frame clamps and pivots together with the pivot tube for the rear triangle would be a total nightmare in carbon.
In some ways carbon would be an ideal material for a Brompton - the stiffness would be useful given that it's essentially a single beam frame. But in lots of other respects it'd be a disaster, I suspect.
I can understand why. Making something from carbon is fundamentally different from making it from steel or even ali given the nature of the material. If you just copy the design but make it from carbon instead then it's very unlikely to work well. I've done a fair bit of work with carbon myself, both wet lay-up and pre-preg (vacuum-bagged in a home-made curing oven) and the only way of making a Brompton-esque frame from carbon would involve high pressure moulds. That would require either an autoclave or inflatable internal bladders, and even a simple mould (machined from a large block of aluminium billet) would cost tens of thousands to produce. Making the fixtures like the frame clamps and pivots together with the pivot tube for the rear triangle would be a total nightmare in carbon.
In some ways carbon would be an ideal material for a Brompton - the stiffness would be useful given that it's essentially a single beam frame. But in lots of other respects it'd be a disaster, I suspect.