Body Material

[chrisdoha]

I need a little help in choosing the material for the body of the car. Since v are a new college, i hav no clue on wat material to use..please suggest

thanx

[chrisdoha]

I need a little help in choosing the material for the body of the car. Since v are a new college, i hav no clue on wat material to use..please suggest

thanx

[Horace]

we're a first year team also, and since I'm fairly certain we'll be tight on time and money, and we don't have much machinery either, we're going to do a hand made aluminum body.

[Anday]

with a lot of patience and sanding, you can make respectable bodywork out of bondo-glass or any inexpensive fiberglass fabric and polyester resin.
i have never seen a quality aluminum body, and to do one that looked very good it would take a lot of time with a hammer and a lot of patience.

[Biggy72]

I should have taken more pictures, but you can see what we did here: http://sae.wsu.edu/media/06-07_body/

I just took everything off the frame, put a plastic drop cloth over the entire thing and then stretched a piece of fleece I bought at a fabric store over the chassis. I then wetted out as much as possible with resin. We had a really old gel coat material I used next, but a couple layers of fiberglass would work just as well to stiffen it up a little.

Then bondo and prime the entire thing. If you can put a block of foam on the nose of the car for the nose do it now, otherwise pull the fleece off and make something to hold the entire thing then figure out a way to attatch a foam block to the fleece. I had a rebar frame underneath and then used body filler to smooth the transition. Smooth the entire thing out, and then prime it.

Wax the plug, use about 3 layers of glass and resin, normal release material, and then the fleece used to soak up the extra resin can be the same fleece you started with. Also for the vacuum bag just use thick painters drop cloth and duct tape to seal the edges.

We were able to build our entire body in about a week and a half and we probably spent about $200 on the entire thing. Just be sure that when laying down the glass make sure all seams are as smooth as possible. This will ensure that you dont' have to do too much work before paint.

[civicsit]

We got our nosecone cnc on a 4 axis mill out of foam. We then make a mold of fiberglass off of that. Then use the mold to make our carbon fiber nosecone. You can do the same with the sidepods.