05/12/2018 FRIDAY #ASKMEANYTHING – EPISODE 5

This week’s question comes from our Instagram fan @dasmatias – “What autoclaves do you use to cook the fiber, which parameters are more important to consolidate the stiffness, and what parts of the frame require more material?”.

Here’s Cesar’s answer, in english and spanish for this week:

“We use an oven as the frames are being cured in a closed mold which does not require the use of an autoclave, which is needed mainly for flat open parts. It wouldn’t make much sense for us to use an autoclave. The stiffness of the frame is consolidated with the curing temperature and post-cured to harden the resin. These values are dependent on the resin used in the pre-preg. Regarding the most critical parts of the frame, those are headtube area, shock mount and link axles, as you can probably imagine. On a hardtail the seat post area becomes also very important as you have very high G forces due to the absence of rear suspension.”

“No utilizamos autoclaves, lo hacemos con un horno ya que las bicicletas al curarse en un molde completamente cerrado el autoclave no tiene sentido alguno. La rigidez del cuadro la consolida la curva de temperatura y el post-curado, estos valores varían dependiendo de la resina utilizada. En cuanto a los puntos del cuadro donde se necesita material, a groso modo las partes mas importantes son la pipa de dirección, soporte del amortiguador y links.”

As usual, for your chance to ask anything you want to Cesar Rojo, post your question as a comment on our social channels each friday.