Chris Benoy (Carbon Copy)

Matt - The main reason we don't generally do entirely bespoke undercarriages is the man hours it takes to create a decent mould in the first place, there are a number of ways to do this in a temporary way, a sheet of 2-3mm thick aluminium bent to shape works and the method shown in the article above by Ken also looks good. If we were supplied a mould by a customer (which does happen both with trade customers and regular modelers) we could create an undercarriage for a specified plane weight from any material. Bob - When I took over I was generally told not to give away information on resins used on the basis that it is effectively a trade secret and it would be bad for us if people (possibly in China) were to replicate our process however if people think that we are making an inferior product as a result of that I guess I will have to break that rule. The resin used in our undercarriages is an epoxy based vinylester resin. It is a very high quality resin roughly twice the price of a standard Lloyds approved poly resin, if you have a look online there are countless discussions of Epoxy V Vinylester and their relative strengths, generally speaking they give similar performance. We used it based on a study into full sized composite aircraft landing gear that found vinylester worked very well. There are several benefits of using this, it is U.V resistant, has a long gel time and it is significantly less toxic than epoxy when used in a dusty environment. Considering we cut and belt sand our undercarriages to shape in a very dust heavy environment this is important to us. It may not be the absolute theoretical best out there but it is certainly the best all rounder for our uses. There are a number of reasons for an undercarriage to fail but the majority of these are down to the skill of the laminator rather than material qualities. Thanks, Chris

I would just like to say that we are looking into 100% carbon fibre undercarriages at the moment, we have several prototypes being tested and they seem promising. To date we have never really made an undercarriage for the out and out lightweight 3D / competition market however this is something that we are working on now. Fully carbon undercarriages need to be treated with a lot of respect however as while they are very strong for their weight they are a lightweight construction and wont take abuse. At present we do a fully fibreglass undercarriage (with a white gelcoat) and our standard undercarriage which has always been a combination of carbon and fibreglass, this is to allow a reasonable amount of flexibility which is usually a good thing when landing a plane. The fully fibreglass undercarriage is very very flexible and is suitable for club trainers and very bumpy landing strips as they will take a lot of the landing stresses from the underside of the plane. Undercarriages are always going to be a very subjective product as everyone likes a slightly different set of characteristics, I am hoping by the time we release out fully carbon undercarriages we will have something to suit everyone. With 27 different shapes and more on the way we should be able to cater for most planes and since we handmake these in the UK we can create undercarriages of different strengths within these shapes to cater to different plane weights and flying styles. Since I took over the day to day running of Carbon Copy in mid 2012 I have tried to increase the stock levels to the point that we can send most items out very quickly as I know that people often need things straight away, this isn't always possible but we do out best, equally I have been replacing a lot of the moulds to improve the surface finish of the parts. We continue to develop our undercarriages in order to make them as light and as strong as they can be which is important as composite technology is always evolving. If anyone has any questions then feel free to contact me either through the forum or at [email protected]. Thanks, Chris

Someone has snapped one up already, I was so impressed I chucked in a free tailplate to go with it. I've gotten slightly overexcited and have just ordered a Mini Jazz kit for myself...

Hi Guys, i've just added a 25% off deal on our CCU00 undercarriage to our website for all you Mini Jazz builders. Apologies to all who have already purchased them. Is great to see them being used. If anyone would like to send us pictures of their planes once they are completed and in use to [email protected] then they might get used on the new website we are about to launch. The link to the page is here - **LINK** Good luck with the mass build, an excellent concept. If there is anything we can supply for the other builds in a similar way then please let me know.