SEQUENCE Carbon Fibre Downhill Bike

The design and manufacture of leading edge carbon fibre MTB frames is normally the reserve of established companies with a large team of engineers and an even larger budget, independent design engineer Vladimir Yordanov chose to challenge this by fulfilling his long ambition to design and produce a batch of his own downhill mountain bikes.

As with most composite projects the first hurdle was the mould. Typically, in volume production, mould tools for a bicycle frame would be machined from billet aluminium, however this was prohibitively expensive for this project so, with our recommendation, Vlad decided that creating composite tooling from epoxy model-board would provide moulds that were perfectly accurate and sufficiently durable for smaller batch production at a fraction of the cost.

The pattern was CNC machined from epoxy model board using a 3-axis router and moulds were then produced from the XPREG XT135 prepreg tooling system. Which made strong, precise and temperature stable tooling for the bike. The frame itself was laminated with XPREG XC series prepregs making extensive use of unidirectional reinforcement to optimise the laminate and match the anticipated loads. The curing of both the mould and the frame was done out-of-autoclave in the ECP OV301 benchtop curing oven.

Except for some aluminium frame inserts every part of this project was completed with materials and equipment supplied by easy composites. If you want to learn more about this project, we have an in-depth article on the build in our learning area. Click here to view the full project.