The Carbon Dream Continues

Replaced the bracket holding my Helix Cap 33 with carbon version today. Also replaced the bracket holding the Phoenix Gold 150 amp main fuse. Brackets are full carbon and not fibreglass crap with one layer of cf for aesthetics. You cannot imagine how much effort and carbon material is required to make even a simple bracket. When all it takes is a 5 min job to bend and cut mild steel you have to wet lay-up the carbon cloth. One layer of carbon cloth is 0.25mm thick so to make a 1mm thick bracket you need around 10 layers or so after factoring shrinkage. Then you need to mould in the bends and curves. No joke.

Picture below of said brackets. I had a spare bracket made up for the Helix Cap 33.

Carbon bracket vs crappy starting to rust mild steel bracket. Haha.. wait till Uncle David sees this..

Carbon has one third the mass of steel. Much stiffer too! The only downside is carbon will not bend like steel and will break if the force applied to it exceeds it's shear strength. Pictured below of the bracket and Helix Cap 33 installed. Need to replace crappy mild steel nut. Blue or gold anodized titanium would look lovely.

Picture below of Phoenix Gold 0AWG/150amp main fuse with carbon holder mounted. Too lazy to make the other bracket as that has too many compound curves.

Too much work for too little carbon? Don't worry. I had my rear Nismo bootlid lip/spoiler removed in order to make an investment mould for a carbon version. Was originally going to buy a spare spoiler to make the mould so my stock spoiler would remain virgin but one joker wanted to sell me his second hand spoiler for close to stock list price while the other joker told me he was going to check the shipping cost of his spoiler and get back to me but he never did. Guess I'll spend the money instead to repaint my stock spoiler back to like new after the mould is completed and sell it off later. Picture below of spoiler removed. The stock spoiler is held onto the bootlid only with double sided tape. Damn heavy too. I'll get it weighted for comparison when my carbon spoiler is ready. Brabus Rocket here I come! :P

After more than an hour of lotsa WD40, muscle ache, sweat and swearing the boot lid looked much more presentable. Man! Do my fingers ache from scrapping of the double sided tape residue &*(*^%&%#@! Could have made it to look mint with some Autoglym polish but polish or wax is the last thing you want to get on the area where you're gonna be installing the carbon spoiler again via double sided tape.

I also had my number plates done up in carbon. Carbon parts should be ready in about a month or two (sooner for the number plates). Spend the rest of the morning watching Kimi win the Ozzie GP, discussing other carbon parts for the Slowtra and sms'ing Jacko & Uncle Foo who wanted a carbon airbox. The possibilities are endless and only limited by my budget or lack of :) Man I can't sleep!

Oh, I know this is not related to carbon composites but I'm too lazy to start another article. I had the "SG" badge removed also while removing the rear spoiler. Thinking to stick the "Nismo" decal beneath the "Sentra" badge and "S-Tune" beneath the "1.6 VTC" badge. What do you think? Will the rear boot lid look too cluttered?