Segmented Carbon Flex Enclosure for Trampa Urban Carver

just wanted to give a quick headsup on the trampa urban carver Im working on and since you can pretty much just buy anything except for decent enclosures nowadays, I just wanted to show the works Ive done on my enclosure during the last few days!

already in early 2015 I had the idea of a segmented carbon enclosure to allow flex - back then with my topspeed:

… but a bargain vanguard passed my way back then and i never went through with it - instead for the last 2 boards I always used split enclosures closely at the trucks to preserve a boards natural flex as good as possible.

well, today is the day for my first segmented carbon enclosure, since the trampas are too short for short split enclosures and I was tired of the ugly boxes on top of the decks. and oh boy, it was probably the hardest thing I have done so far with vacuum and carbon. :expressionless:

I started to make wood forms with pleasantly rounded 0.5cm radius edges. 5 of these segments are 14x8cm to give room for 2x4 18650 cells for a 10S4P segmented battery. finally a larger segment 14x11cm for dual vesc and a switch. I used double adhesive tape to fixate the wood blocks on the trampa, which has no concave, so it was kinda easy to do.

I then covered the blocks with separation foil - kinda a tough kind so I wouldnt mess with resin on board and wood blocks. each segment in the picture is separated by a small wood spacer that I covered with clear tape, whose dimension should fit exactly between each segment once I got all the glas & carbon layers set up.

at the sides of the wood block, I used very thin dbl adhesive tape to fold the separation foil in order to avoid too many wrinkles and to make application of resin and layups easy. its super annoying, when you do your layup on a separation foil and its moving around the whole time.

I then tried something new (bear in mind that this was actually already my 2nd try - the first try I had a lot of folding of carbon with separation foil. :frowning:

I made the total layup dry - 2x 400gr/m^2 glas, 2x 200gr/m^2 carbon, each time using the wood spacers to bring each layer of fabric into form using my fingers to bent the fabric around all the edges so that it would follow the mold halfway well. THEN I started to use resin and tried to soak the whole 4 layers at once, working it in with a roller and trying to keep the layups snug to the mold as good as possible. while doing that I still had the wood spacers in like in my previous picture! sadly I got no pictures of this process, since it was already way past midnight and I quickly had my hands full with resin.

in the end when I felt everything was wet down to the separation foil, I removed the wood spacers and carefully put a bleeder layer ontop (separation foil with small holes in it):

you can see that each segment still looks kinda bloated without good definition of the mold form, but its following the mold halfway well and it doesnt have supermany wrinkles. I carefully laid the bleeder to avoid a dangerous foil carbon folded wrinkle (hard to explain, but its basically a carbon->foil->carbon layup that can happen when foil and carbon wrinkle together).

finally I added the soaking layer (again as wrinkle free as possible) and added the wooden spacers back into the mix - then off with it into the vacuum bag! I kept massaging the segments for a quite long time in order to make sure that I had no dry patches - you can see very well where you have excess resin by looking at the soaking layer. was kinda paranoid that I would get try patches, since the way I added the resin was a little similar to resin infusion.

after 24hours curing I removed the enclosure from the vacuum bag - it looked quite decent, no dry patches … just the wood spacers and wood molds didnt really come out without a fight:

I drilled small holes, inserted a screw and pulled the wood blocks and wood spacers out:

after cutting and some sanding of a few wrinkles, the enclosure now looks really nice:

and it flexes really easily:

and the beauty of vacuum bagging: it just fits!

for the battery that will run on the inside: on my first test I realized that I wont be able to really get the interconnections of each segment completely flat with my wood spacers - and I also realized that a lot of resin will just be in the area between the segments below the wood spacers - just enough that I can actually dremel a few flat channels without hurting the fabric and run battery cables through there! :slight_smile:

70 Likes

A beauty :heart_eyes:

2 Likes

Beautiful work as always. Question: What kind of vacuum do you use?

I always wanted to try my hand at CF / fiberglass vac-forming, the only vacuum at my disposal is the ol’ foodsaver in my kitchen. Would it be a disaster to try to use this for vacuum bagging?

1 Like

You’re an artist!

1 Like

Had the same idea for my cruiser board where i want to keep the flex. Great to see that it is doable.

1 Like

this looks GREAT! wow carbon lol. What is the total capacity ur gonna throw in there?

1 Like

I got a small vacuum pump thats capable of -900mbar at good days - you need a good vacuum to do these kind of sharp features. if you have more forgiving curvatures anything works, otherwise each 100mbar of vacuum is worth 1ton of pressure per square meter!

going with 10S4P, 5 segments @ 2x4 18650 cells each!

Can’t we just make a deal that whatever you do you do twice and I get the spare one? :wink: Great job as always

2 Likes

Where did u buy the material for all this and how much was it?

i actually got the spare one right here - it was my first try with the optical imperfections of folded foil & carbon at the points where you can still see the blue foil. it does not affect functionality, its a purely aesthetic thing. :yum:

if you want it, poke me :smile:

all stuff from www.r-g.com - total material cost probably 40-50€!

3 Likes

Ate you planning to sell these? Please hit me up ASAP!

hehe, nah sorry, I got so little time that i barely manage to bring my own projects forward :confused:

the enclosure was a lot of work and its still far from perfect. think this might be something for resin infusion - dry layups follow a form much better than already wetted stuff.

1 Like

Nice work, as usual from you! how much for the spare deck?

That is a shame.

Nice work and I still remember your old Topspeed thread on Endless Spheres.

I will have a go with it by making slits in Trampa’s battery compartment.

1 Like

That’s just EPIC!

1 Like

we all agree that this is a beauty ! but man that’s such commitment and dedication. Always bringing new stuff to the table… that’s “just” another @whitepony masterpiece ! awesome mate. This build will be crazy.

3 Likes

We can just hope that @trampa is following this thread closely :wink:

I am sure that some enterprising individual would be able to put together a cheaper version of this with a thin flexible thermoformed plastic such as PETG, like with a plastic coke bottle. I would get one!

As your enclosure is the same width as the deck, you might not need to drill holes through your deck to secure it. You could use pairs of compression clips/clamps around the edge, something like a Nalclip or a MoriClip (the latter is probably better).

Not sure what people’s thoughts would be about the aesthetics of something like this, or how many clips would be required, but as the trampa deck is significantly thinner, the full width enclosure opens up a range of options to secure an enclosure through using compression, as opposed to glue and/or bolts. It would also allow you to access the batteries, and potentially battery hot-swapping options.

3 Likes

i could do that, but aethetically thats a no go for me :smile: ill make the enclosure just a little bit slimmer and use my typical screw combo.

yesterday I drilled all holes but didnt have enough inserts. anyway, thats how this will look in the end:

9 Likes

problem is that these slits were so far always on the wrong side of the enclosure - it allows you to follow the boards curvature but at the same time its a solid piece of board layer 2cm above the original last layer. it will be under a lot of stress from flexing and most likely completely change your boards flex level to become a lot stiffer!

the closest to this fully segmented type of enclosure is @Kaly really nice kydex enclosures, which are pretty generic already. but their focus is bending of the middle area, not sure how that feels in practice. for example i dont like the feeling of split enclosures when there isnt enough wood between them. you can feel how only a small part of the board is flexing and the rest is stiffened up.

overall Im not too convinved by these trampa enclosures, as much as Id like to use a consistently looking material mix! problem of my kind of enclosure is, that its not very generic, so either you have a lot of versions or youll dictate the kind of electronics you want in there.