Carbon copy

[Mark a]

Hi all. Just took delivery of new landing gear for my Sbach 30cc. The old gear is made of alloy but it may well be rubber as it bends quite badly unless every landing is a greaser. The new carbon copy gear looks good and has a small amount of flex in it so hopefully it will stop the prop hitting the ground on those not so good landings. Carbons service has been first class as i only ordered on Monday and the gear arrived today.

[Jon Laughton]

I have ordered quite a few things from them in the past and always had excellent service...

[Kevin Fairgrieve]

Two orders.

Super fast delivery and a top notch product.

Kev

[Matt Jones]

To add some balance my experience was pretty poor and I won't be using them again

[will -0]

There's another thread on here somewhere about "carbon coated glass copy".

[iqon]

Excellent service, ordered landing gear Tuesday PM, fitted Wednesday PM.

[Ronaldo]

Carbon copy undercarriages were fine for sports type fun models, but the ones I've had in the past were not truthfully 100% fully 'carbon',they were glass fibre sanwiched between 2 thin layers of carbon and became delaminated after time when i used them on 50cc - 100cc models. You just need to remember that if you are expecting to receive a 'fully carbon' undercarriage to save disapointment

Edited By Ronaldo on 01/05/2015 10:22:27

[ken anderson.]

check out this.............. how to make your own-appeared in the mag..by one of our members..

ken Anderson...ne....... 1.make your own dept.

[Chris Benoy (Carbon Copy)]

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

[Matt Jones]

Thanks Chris, great update. My expierences of CC were both pretty bad in terms of product and service but were pre 2012, sounds like you have a good plan and are implementing it. If you bring out a range of full carbon gear I'd be happy to give you my business

Have you ever thought of a bespoke service or would customers find it prohibitively expensive? I make my own at the moment but would be more than happy for someone else to do it!

[Ronaldo]

That's good news Chris. Repacement fully carbon u/c are not always easy to get hold of. I wish you every success with your venture.
Ronaldo

[Bob Cotsford]

I've used a few CC products and have generally been pleased though I was disappointed when the CC fibreglass U/C on my second-hand Dragon Lady started delaminating after only several years service on grass fields

Chris, apart from cost, is there a reason that you use polyester resins rather than epoxy?

[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

[sticky fingers]

just a quick comment on composites,having had extensive experience in the materials and resins.They are very strong and tough but, if you abuse them you can expect failures such has been described, de-lamination and fracture in some cases. I have found over the years that peoples expectations of composites is that they are indestructable and last forevevernot true even inthe full size aviation field there are many unanswered questions in relation to composites and the research and development is ongoing.Just my twopennorth.

Dave

[will -0]

Nice to hear carbon copy's attitude is changing! FWIW, weston used to do a full carbon U/C for theirn Hype product. In my experience this was very robust.

CC used to claim this was impossible

[Bob Cotsford]

Thanks for the disclosure Chris, I'd taken it to be a polyester based on the smell when working it. just in case the smiley wasn't clue enough, the U/C that came on the Dragon Lady looked far from new when I got the model, and it took years of rough field abuse to cause it to delaminate!