Sure, the fiber itself maybe cheap, but processing that fiber into different shapes still costs a fair amount of money. Carbon fiber layup is still a fairly labor intensive and somewhat wasteful process.
Bombardier spent a lot of money in trying to locate the Learjet 85 fuselage lay-up process in Mexico, instead of Belfast in the UK, only to find that the resulting parts were delaminating because the process had been developed for Belfast's climate and sea-level pressure.
Eventually the 85 project was 'suspended', as it remains today. Unfortunately most of the staff at the Querétaro site were laid-off as a result.
That said I just saw a talk yesterday about DNA folding and of course trying to replicate the experiment in a different lab caused a tenth of degree variation which voided the whole thing.
Ireland is a damp place; it doesn’t surprise me that carbon fibre layup didn’t work in the same way in Mexico!
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/241/...
It's a short tale about a sausage factory that moved from an old facility to a brand new state of the factory and discovering their sausages no longer tasted the same, despite using the same ingredients, etc. and how the eventually worked out what the difference was.
Shift in humidity = adjustment in drying of raw material & tweak to drying time as the product comes off the line = variability in total production time, for example.
Surprisingly, as referenced in the Bombardier example, adjusting to ambient environment is often manual/overlooked: it’s trial and error on the manufacturer’s part to make the adjustments necessary.
Depends on the industry. Some, like semiconductor chip manufacturing, go to extreme lengths. One plank of Intel's success is a strategy to measure everything they can, and calibrate every copy of a factory until they all line up. Don't try to figure out every possible causal connection, just control and copy exactly everything you can measure.
It's also the where a fairly large printing company has it's central printing facility. Inside the main warehouse over tons of paper a fine mist if intermittently created, keeping the paper malleable. In a less damp environment this misting process might have to be intensified.
You also have to use expensive, stiff epoxy resin if you want to have the mechanical properties of carbon fiber. Fiberglass is typically laid up in cheaper polyester resin since glass fiber are stretchier than carbon fiber.
To make a bike you need a special mold/jig for each part for each bike size. These cost money to make so to scale out the process is expensive (I.e. to have a lot of workers producing bikes concurrently). With metal tubing you can just make a lot if it and then cut, bend and weld it. Every worker doesn't need an expensive jig. And like you said, just laying up the fibre on a jig is time consuming and manual.
Anyway, they can make extremely light aluminium bikes now with really good ride characteristics and they won't break if you drop them the wrong way!
They were going to use it in the Nissan Delta Wing, but i think alot of that fell by the wayside when they elected to use the Monocoque from the Aston Marton AMR-1 rather than a bespoke tub. Never really heard much about it after that.
Would you mind expanding on that? I'm curious around the barriers to mass-produced carbon fiber.
A glass fiber/polyester panel will be no worse than a carbon fiber/polyester panel. So if you choose polyester you'd be a fool to use a reinforcement more expensive than glass fiber.
So as a practical matter, the decision to use carbon fiber reinforcement implies the use of epoxy resin.