Well here goes nothing. I am taking a shot at doing my own carbon fiber stuff! I bought a kit from composite envisions and I am tackling the hardest of all first, cause well, that's just how I am. The mirror caps. Here are some pics of the first few stages. It's still too cold here for setting the epoxy so I made a sort of oven with foil and work lights. I see now that the high price of carbon fiber material is not the cf itself, but the time consuming attention to detail and working with the resin that makes it such an art-piece. Shown here is the carbon fiber before the first epoxy coat.

 

looks like an interesting project

 

Well I ended up with some air bubbles but overall not bad for my first try. It's one of those things that probably only I will notice.

 

Looks pretty good to me! How much is one of these kits?

 

It was $100 and more than enough to do plenty of stuff. My biggest challenge was the air bubbles. They are visible at the end and leave little pock marks. I think a heat gun would be better than a hair dryer. There are definetly all of things to learn. In retrospect something flatter would be easier and practicing first would be good too

 

I was thinking about doing my dash trim inserts. I'm sure those will be a little tricky as well.

 

looking good~

 

Yep so Was I I ordered a few swatch samples of carbon fiber to see what it looks like in person to determine which color to go with. Im thinking of doing the silver carbon fiber with a light blue epoxy .. I guess I'll need to do a few test. I have messed around in photoshoot trying to get an Idea of what it would look like. Granted my Mini is being or going through the birthing process as I type this .... so its all guessing work right now ...

 

Those color combos sound great. I was going to play around with the red carbon/kevlar blend.

Also,I was thinking of trying some dash trim as well.

One major thing to consider in choosing your first piece to try is what kind of edge do you want? With the mirror caps i knew i needed a clean, trim finished edge and that was another difficulty. Actually they would mot even go back on until i dremmeled the crap out of the edges then sanded it back down. So if you have a tight junction then you need to lay the cf perfect to get a thin edge of resin on top of it.

Basically the better you lay the cf the less sanding you have do and well, i did a lot

And for a clear coat i just used a spray can of duplicolor clear coat.

 

Take a look at this site as its filled with a lot of pics and info I read where you can mix flake with the epoxy and you experiment on different things too Im all for doing something no one else has done before but the key is for it to look good and not tacky LOL
http://blog.ocarbon.comhttp://ocarbon.com/gallery