Ok, if anybody's seen Mythbusters, you know that vacuum forming machine that they have? It's supposed to make a mold of the object in a plastic materail that is akin to a plastic soda bottle (only thicker).

Now, here's the tricky part...are the bumpers/fenders/hood/rear quarterpanels all that structurally necessary, now, I understand that on a stock car the rear 1/4 panels are very important but what about the other parts?

I want to make molds of each of these parts and replace them accordingly on the body. There will be bracing (since I'm sure the mold plastic by itself of pretty flimsy) probably made of FG or possibly CF. This should severly reduce the amount of weight on the car.
The main use that I want to use this idea for is for racing. Assume that there will be a full cage with extensions into the engine bay and the proper supports for the bumpers. The benefits of doing this would be that to compete in certain classes you have to have a certain weight and modifications (to be honest, I haven't really looked in depth of the rules to see if this would be allowed though) and if you place the weight that you removed from the panels directly to the floor pan, you lower the center of gravity and make it easier to balance the distribution. Does anyone have any input on this idea?

 

Is this that hard to answer?

 

It all sounds prohivitively expensive for negligible gains. It also sounds incredibly difficult to do and probably no one else has actually gone through with full CF body panels on an FC.

You'd be unique, for sure

 

I'm not well versed in CF right now, but don't CF molds have to be metal? Because of the epoxy's? With this method the original part goes on the table, you suck the plastic around it and *bam* there's a brand new fender. (minus the bracing of course) No molds.

 

The trick to FG/CF is getting a mold to be perfect and then waxing it and using a mold release agent as well.

I've made molds out of FG before and as long as you wax the mold and give it a decent layer of mold release it's easy to pop out.

The problem with the plastic forming is that it's a large and expensive thing to usually make.

I coudl see making a mold out of vacuum formed plastic and then reinforcing the mold with FG and stuff to make it more durable. It may reduce some of the post mold work to get it perfected but it's still a bit of work to get heated plastic to lay properly.

My father use to make small molds and he woudl use the oven to heat the plastic. He then quickly removed it and layed it into the mold and applied pressure to keep it in that shape.

Worked pretty well.