Slow Progress

I thought I was going to be ready to lay up some carbon last weekend, but I realized that I didn't have any peel-ply, which I thought was with the vacuum pump kit. Since there is no supplier of this material near here, I needed to order some. Today (Friday) I am going to pick it up in Kingston at West Marine. They ordered it in from the US so I wouldn't have to pay the courier and brokerage fee.

I did some redesign work in the swing arm/suspension/seat attachment area. I removed the "hump" that was for the seat mount. I am now planning on making some balsa/carbon laminate flat sheets to use for the rear shock and seat mount uprights. The sheet pieces will be epoxied and carbon wrapped to the rear end of the frame after the first two layers of carbon sleeve are on the frame. This will make the frame construction much easier as the carbon sleeves will shape very nice around the newly streamlined rear end.

I shaped the hub that I going to be using as the swing arm pivot. It started life as a rear freewheel hub. I ground down the spoke connection points to give me a nice small piece that needs to be wrapped in fibreglass then carbon and then will be mounted into the carved out frame piece with epoxy then wrapped/bonded with several layers of carbon.

The swing arm is starting to take shape, you can see the general lay out here. What is missing so far is the rear shock mount which will be custom built once the swing are is attached to the frame and I can get accurate measurements. The mount will be a "U" shaped mount which drops below the swing arm to allow for the necessary shock length.
The plywood and balsa pieces you see will be sandwiched in carbon to give me some mounting points for the front and rear swing arm components. The rear drop outs are from the Rocky Mountain that I cut up and got the bike components from. The paint will be ground off, the aluminum etched with a West System aluminum etch kit and then wrapped with fibreglass followed by carbon to bond them to the balsa and then the foam. It will become a big aluminum, balsa, foam, fibreglass, carbon sandwich. The front dropout will be sandwiched plywood/carbon and then I will cut the 10mm dropout shape for the hub/swingarm attachment. The rear end will be connect via a normal rear quick release skewer, which should allow for quick removal if that is ever required.