Making a carbon fiber case
Carbon fiber seems to be a great material for phones, being lightweight and durable. An example is this iPhone case made of carbon fiber, which costs USD 80,- and can be bought from Belch (http://www.belchco.com).
It is apparently hard to automate the manufacturing process of carbon fiber objects. That’s bad for business but good for the craft community. According to make magazine, it’s not all too complicated to make a custom carbon fiber case (http://makezine.com/09/primer), so lets try that. They made a case for an iPod, which involved making a mold, sanding and cutting. I am too lazy for that and therefore tried a simplified version for my external harddisk instead (plus I don’t have an iPod).
As noted before, making a nice cast is currently not an option, so I just cover the case in wax paper instead.
Then I cut the sheet of carbon fiber down to a convenient size to cover the harddisk nicely.
Time for mixing the epoxy. Due to a lack of tools, I can’t mix the exact amount of resin with hardener and eyeball the mixing ratio instead. Not very smart and should not be replicated. At this stage, the project is turning into an open ended experiment.
The epoxy gets pretty warm inside the cup, thus melting it. Not good.
I mix another batch of epoxy in another cup. Unfortunately, only a few drops of epoxy are left for the case now, barely enough to nicely put the thing together. Also not so good.
Anyways, although the epoxy was not mixed properly, it hardens. You can see a still live of case and harddisk below.
The closeup reveals some structural problems with the case, which can be attributed to a lack of epoxy, knowledge, dedication and preparation.
Anyways, carbon fiber is good fun and makes me want to repeat this experiment! (With more epoxy, knowledge, dedication and preparation.)
Tags: carbon fiber phone craft