Remanufactured Exterior Trim, Any Interest?

[johnhenry 20]

Morning all

 

I've just been chatting to a chap who had some exterior plastic trim remanufactured, seemed like a good idea, maybe for 205's?

 

I just wanted to get peoples opinion on if this seems like a good idea?

 

AIMS:

1) To remanufacture all exterior plastic trims:

> Rear

> n/s & o/s Rear quarter

> n/s & o/s Doors

> n/s & o/s Front Wings

> Front

 

2) Do it affordably

 

opinions welcome

 

Cheers

John

[farmer 327 1 Cars]

John

 

I would be interested.

 

I have a full set of new mouldings bar one I acquired in grey, so am short.

 

If fairness the price would need to be near retail for each one to gain momentum.

 

And what colour would everybody want, as you have the phase 1.5 or phase 2 black conundrum.

[mowflow 67]

I didn't think mouldings were much of an issue. Red inserts on the other hand.... if someone could make those without them costing a kidney for the full set.

[notamondayfan 44]

I didn't think mouldings were much of an issue. Red inserts on the other hand.... if someone could make those without them costing a kidney for the full set.

 

I second that, £120 for a front bumper insert is pretty steep!

[nick205 12 5 Cars]

The issue will be tooling. To make a set of injection mould tools for the arch and door plastics would cost serious money in the £10's of thousands. A sister company to ours has just tooled a plastic accelerator pedal assembly for the mk1 Ford Focus at a cost of $16k.

 

Looking at the red inserts I'd guess they're rolled from pre-painted ally strip. Again, the tooling would be significant to do this and anyone doing it would want to make a lot of it to be worthwhile. Ally extrusion manufacturers typically want to run 1,000m as a minimum. Might be interesting to work out the length of red inserts around a 205 though - bet there's a good 10m or so on each car.

[johnhenry 20]

I'm going to chat to a couple of plastic mould companies

 

Another weird idea a mate suggested was looking into 3d printed exterior trim, looking into that this weekend as it would need to be flexible and not brittle, pretty sure materials in 3d printing are still those two properties.

 

Also Meeting a chap next tuesday afternoon about potentially getting some ideas about how the red strip would be made up too

[farmer 327 1 Cars]

Would prefer mouldings, I think am doing OK for red inserts at the moment

Edited January 17, 2014 by farmer

[notamondayfan 44]

Another weird idea a mate suggested was looking into 3d printed exterior trim, looking into that this weekend as it would need to be flexible and not brittle, pretty sure materials in 3d printing are still those two properties.

 

 

3D printing would be far to expensive for the scale we are talking about. I would say a wheel arch trim would be £200+, and to be honest the technology isn't quite there yet. The materials you can print with are incredible, plastic, rubber, metals, sandstone, but it's still only really used for rapid prototyping. The finish is quite grainy, and would require a lot of labour to get a decent plastic finish.

 

I've been looking into 3D printing recently, as I'm a 3D illustrator, and give it a year or two and prices will fall, and quality will increase.

 

Perhaps things like small clips could be printed at a useful price. If any one has any suggestions for something small, that is no longer available, I can look into it.

 

Dean

[johniban 59 1 Cars]

im at that stage i need some!

[Roon 29 1 Cars]

I'd be interested and surely the business can only grow as bits become more and more rare. If pay good money for phase 2 bits all day long.

[johnhenry 20]

Exterior Plastics Update: I've emailed a local injection mould place and am hoping to get abit more information about limitations and requirements for them, as many have pointed out a couple of issues with the idea.

 

Regarding Ph1 or Ph2 (grey or black) - will hopefully be able to get to decisions like that at a later date

 

 

Red Trim Update: Im meeting a chap on tuesday who is a fabricator who might be able to shed more light onto it, or at least put me into contact with a company who can give me information

 

Going to measure the combined length of all red trims on the car tomorrow to get an idea of that.

 

3D Printed items: Fair point on the sizes and prices.

 

 

Will keep updating

Cheers

John

[mowflow 67]

Would prefer mouldings, I think am doing OK for red inserts at the moment

Aha! That's why they are so hard to get (at a decent price).

[farmer 327 1 Cars]

Numerous raids on our European friends stock.

 

I found two of each insert bar the drivers door in Sc*nthorpe last month.

 

So they are out there.

[welshpug 1,621]

Was it yc plastics?

[johnhenry 20]

Was it yc plastics?

 

nah, company called KPM in cardiff. Im going to try a few more as they haven't got back to me today, YC worth a call?

[welshpug 1,621]

might be, I think they do stuff for Jaguar/Landrover.

[dcc 855]

YC are vacuum formed plastics, not injection.

[johnhenry 20]

From YC Plastics website.

 

"At YC Plastics. we have the very latest vacuum forming equipment. processing thermoplastics from 1mm to 10mm thick, and up to 2 by 1.2 meters in size."

 

That would count front and rear bumpers out right in terms of dimensions right?

[welshpug 1,621]

bumpers are fibreglass.

[nick205 12 5 Cars]

From YC Plastics website.

 

"At YC Plastics. we have the very latest vacuum forming equipment. processing thermoplastics from 1mm to 10mm thick, and up to 2 by 1.2 meters in size."

 

That would count front and rear bumpers out right in terms of dimensions right?

 

 

Vac forming is limited in terms of dimensional accuracy and tolerance and would struggle IMHO to produce the trim mouldings. It still requires tooling although only the male half of the pattern and this can sometimes be done in wood or other softer materials than tool steel. Vac formings also typically require trimming and any holes adding afterwards, which ups the labour cost and tooling for drilling jigs. Finally, it has limitations on how sharp you can radius edges.

 

You can make what are known as soft tools for injection moulding. These are typically cast using 3D rapid prototype parts and may produce a small number of proper plastic parts from the tool. However you'd need an accurate 3D CAD model of each part to start with (or possibly use an original moulding to make the soft tool) in order to produce the RP part. You could digitise/scan existing parts to achieve this, but again your talking specialist equipment and peoples time to use it.

 

Given the level of investment required to create the necessary tooling, I can't see who would fund it and be assured of paying it back, let alone making any money on it. You'd need a LOT of paid for pre-orders to get close.

 

I'm not trying to stop you BTW, just that I do this sort of thing at work. If it helps, I can ask our tool makers, both in the UK and China to give ball park figures for tooling say a front arch trim piece if you can provide detailed photos and some measurements?

[2-Pugs 57]

Been doing a lot of thinking and research into reproducing parts myself as well lately.

 

I would have thought the original bumpers were made on an almightly press. I have seen one that makes vending machine doors from exactly the same sort of material and it was so tall, they had to raise the roof of the building slightly! I have in my head it was 500 ton, but that might be wrong. The tool is absolutley enormous and cost a fortune. It'll be similiar with those bumpers I would say. Hence, I dont think you could replicate the oe bumpers from that type of material for anything like a reasonable price. We're going to have to get used to making secondhand ones look nice or settle for the the flimsier plastic copies.

 

Injection mould tools to make the side arch trims are going to be in the order of 10s of thousands of pounds, again they are big parts which will need a big tool.

 

Unfortunately you soon realise that there are no benefits of scale to help you when tackling these projects. It's also partly why supercars cost so much if you think about it, they sell so few that they have exactly the same cost issue we have here.

 

The red trims would be a good bet though. Having talked it over with some people at work in some detail, I think it is simply made from flat sheet that passes through a series of rollers that form the returns. Then painted and bent where appropriate. The economies of scale mean that I think this would pay for itself fairly quickly. It'll still be a lot of work to set up with a company to make them, and then someone to paint them though.

 

3-D printing is a great idea, but at the moment only suitable for non-cosmetic parts, because of surface finish, and I am not sure it is strong enough for things like trim clips where finish is not important but strength is.

 

It's frustrating knowing that a lot of the tooling to make the parts is sitting gathering dust in a supplier's tooling rack somewhere, long since written off by PSA.

[farmer 327 1 Cars]

As far as am aware the bumpers are still available in black anyway.

[jackherer 543]

The plastic parts would face the same problems as the repro gearknobs, they need to be pretty much identical to the originals in terms of colour, texture and durability which is going to be almost impossible to achieve realistically.

 

I am talking to someone about the metal strips, the same person that made me some front bumper bars, he sounded pretty confident...

[2052NV 24]

i would be interested in a full set! but i can see itll be a massive task...

[nick205 12 5 Cars]

 

I would have thought the original bumpers were made on an almightly press. I have seen one that makes vending machine doors from exactly the same sort of material and it was so tall, they had to raise the roof of the building slightly! I have in my head it was 500 ton, but that might be wrong. The tool is absolutley enormous and cost a fortune.

 

It's frustrating knowing that a lot of the tooling to make the parts is sitting gathering dust in a supplier's tooling rack somewhere, long since written off by PSA.

 

 

500 ton would be about right, maybe bigger still. We have a 450 tonne horizontal mould machine in the UK, which is around 30 feet long. It's used to mould components up to around 1m x 1m in size. We recently tooled some rear light surrounds for Bentley. L/R handed parts which are then plated with copper and chrome to produce a metallic looking part. The tools were in the order of $50k for the pair and Bentley don't make that many cars!

 

Manufacturers usually destroy the tooling at the end of life for two reasons, first to prevent unwanted production of parts and second, no one wants to pay the storage on massive heavy mould and press tools that aren't going to generate revenue. The exception is where they sell off or recycle the tooling to produce another vehicle (last gen Audi A4 into Seat Exeo as a current example).

 

I do think you're right on the red inserts, that would be a relatively simple set of roller tools and could be done with pre-coated ally strip. Someone with a lathe could probably make up some rollers and get close to the OEM inserts I reckon!