ricerocket wrote:Do you have a boss that is bonded inside the tube that's molded around the dropout? Or do you just add a whole lot of epoxy to fill space and hope for the best?
You think in the right way. Definitively I don't fill the space just with epoxy because that would not be stiff and it would be naive. My aim is to make a stiff frame. I made some carbon fibre "inserts" for the second frame that fitted precise in the tube, and also had the right hole for the dropouts. If you would cut the area where the dropouts are bonded to the tube, you would see that it is a 100% filled area with pure carbon fibre, and in the case of PROTO-TYPE 2 of course also some ALU because the dropouts.
Probably still not the lightest way with those inserts, but it's just a few grams and the stiffness is assured . Of course after that I still make some more carbon work, also because the visual look.
For the PROTO-TYPE 3 dropouts I will still experiment a bit and after some dropouts I'll see what I will choose. Most probably I'll try to make also a bit "more complexed" design (another mould) for the dropouts, and not just a "flat surface", like the one that I already made. I'll just try to make it a bit different, even a bit improved if it's possible, why not but I can still use those dropouts, because they are really "bulletproof". I made just a prototype some time ago and it was almost impossible to destroy it, so I'm really happy with the resoults.
It is really an interesting piece of frame, it requires quite a lot of handwork to prepare all the carbon fibre pieces and of course the lamination is also quite long, but I really enjoy in this work! For those dropouts I used 2 different types of carbon (the one that you can see as the beauty layer, and a carbon fibre that is called BIAX, -/+ 45) and one type of carbon/kevlar hybrid. It's 22 layers for a 6mm thick dropout
@djconnel
I'm glad that you like it, thanks!