Abstract

Carbon fiber reinforced plastics greatly contribute to weight reduction of vehicles, but their application has been limited due to high manufacturing cost together with the cost of materials. In order to make this material widely available to motorcycles, we developed a technology that makes it possible to manufacture the parts at low cost by using carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic as a material. For the molding, a manufacturing method was developed to directly form a three-dimensional shape without using prepregs while adopting a film stacking method in which a stack of thermoplastic resin films and carbon fiber woven fabrics is formed by hot pressing. When this manufacturing method was applied, issues on the exterior appearances of the part were revealed. We successfully solved the issues by devising the temperature settings and shapes of the molds and realized a product without irregularities of fibers while maintaining the required strength. The developed manufacturing method was applied to the parts of the CRF 450 Rally and the practicality of the method was proved.

References

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Author (organization or company)

• Yoshihide YUZA（Motorcycle R&D Center）

Publication Information

Article of Honda R&D Technical Review Vol.29 No.2 (107 - 115)

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Citation Information