Your part looks like a pan chassis for a race car of some type.
There was a place in FLorida called Aerospace Composites who did R/C chassis in laminated graphite. Don't know if they are still in business. They would do specials if you talked to them right and showed that you weren't too flakey and knew what you were doing and why.
If you can mill with a router and have not done graphite, be forewarned, graphite composites EATS carbide cutters alive and is a PITA mess to cut besides.
G10 fiberglass is great for prototyping and can be made almost as strong/rigid by laminating pre=preg graphit tape to top and bottom.
Jetting might work but precision stuff needs diamond or coated carbide, especially for sharp corners or tight radii. The glass fiber is also tough on cutters. Somebody like conceptmachine who has experience would be the way to go for doing G10 - anybody who does circuit boards could do so as well as they know how to machine the product - that is IF they want to mess around with R/C prototyping (we weren't successful in finding anybody who'd do it at the time).
We were paying WAY more than $20/chassis in onesy twosy for graphite almost 10 years ago. WE were scoring production stuff that wasn't finished (no suspension holes and rough blank as we moved our suspension points around and cut our own "flex holes").
We cut our own proto's out of G10 with dremels and/or hand die grinders before we did graphite. Cheaper to do trial evaluations before cutting the "good stuff".
Come to think of it, the mess and itching was one of the reasons why we quit doing the R/C race stuff. Another and the more effective reason was that it got to be too expensive to try to compete with "factory drivers" who got parts deals that we couldn't get close to scoring.
We ultimately learned that although you could out-tech the factory guys, you couldn't outspend them.....
Have fun.....  |