Carbon levers.-finished pics added

[Noticed]

oh, epoxy resin can give you cancer folks, be careful if you play with it.

[mick_dundee]

Classic!! How long until yo have a complete carbon bike that you can carry up 4 flights of stairs?

At 4 hours a brake/clutch lever I suggest quite a while...

[Rossi]

oh, epoxy resin can give you cancer folks, be careful if you play with it.

I ride too fast & smoke too many ciggies to worry about shit like that

[BrisZX9R]

how the hell do you do this stuff??? What sort of glue do you use? what sort of moulds etc??

I love the look of carbon.... if i could afford it, I would get as much carbon parts as possible.... ie: rear sets (for me & pillion.. if you could buy them) front guard, rear hugger, wheels, levers, body work... anything i could think of.... as much as possible....

[Tinman]

Sorry to say this but thats ugly! my 2 cents

[MiG]

the good carbon stuff is injection moulded with epoxy and baked very hot like 600 Deg C. of course it costs an arm and a leg, the cheaper stuff you see around these days is made like fibreglass often using fibreglass moulds, using vinyl/polyester resin, it is nowhere near as stiff.

The good stuff is still layed up using woven CF sheets preimpregnated with epoxy, vacuum bagged and cured at nowhere near 600 deg, in a pressurised autoclave filled with nitrogen. Resin transfusion moulding is a newer technique that is suitable for higher production volumes. But aircraft parts and F1 cars are still mostly (spin forming is being used on parts with an axis of rotational symmetry) done with prepreg and vacuum bagged.
A good carbon fibre part (efficient, not just a black metal copy) needs to be designed properly i.e the lay up sequence should be engineered to suit your loads and desired stiffnesses and the part needs to be carefully produced with a high volume ratio, no delamination and minimal amount of voids. If that's not what your parts are like then you're wasting your money and just doing it to show off. A crap CF part is an expensive paperweight or worse, an expensive hazard. Then you have to deal with the poor damage tolerance of CFRP in service. It's easy to lose much of your strength from an invisible defect.

I'd stay the hell away from homemade CFRP brake levers, but hey I'm just an engineer.