How many hours to make a monocoque?

[cvargas]

Hello all,

Just out of curiosity about how many hours did it take your team to design and build a monocoque and how much did it cost?

[Bemo]

I guess no team could tell any serious numbers for that. Usually you have a couple of people working hard on it for a couple of weeks. More than a rough guess seems impossible to me.

It's also hard to tell what a monocoque costs you as quite some of the material you might get sponsored or at least cheaper and materials you by you don't use only for the monocoque but for other parts, too.

I'm not even willing to try guessing http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

[cvargas]

I'm just looking for a rough guess on time really.

[bob.paasch]

Time and costs are hugely dependent on the manufacturing process used (wet lay up, vacuum infusion, prepreg).

Like Bemo, I can't give you cost because most of our materials are donated.

We did keep track of time to manufacture last year. About 800 person-hours per monocoque (we built two). That's for prepreg.

[acedeuce802]

If you're serious enough about attempting a monocoque, you should already have an idea about the materials and processes involved. Make up a rough schedule of constructing the monocoque. Research how long each step will take to perform, and how long each step may potentially take to cure. Take into account how many team members you will be able to dedicate to this. A simple analysis should be able to tell you if this will take 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, or 2 years..

[Steve_Chung]

Carlos,

It took us ~200 man hours to make a half monocoque, and it's not finished yet. We're expecting ~300 total to get it fit and finished.

We used origami construction so that takes a considerable amount of time out of the whole process.

-Steve
Maryland FSAE

[theTTshark]

It takes us several hours to remember just how to spell monocoque and then several more hours to stop the news kids from laughing at the word....