Floating rotor carriers - group buy

Mikesps said:

The problem with the carriers is wear under the buttons which allows rotation of the disc.

The cast iron discs can crack between the drilled holes, and then eventually shatter. This disc failed on the track and tore the caliper off the fork leg of a friend's 916 SP.

http://mikesps.smugmug.com/Motorcycles/DSC-Picture-Hosting/i-szptvRz/0/D/IMG_0535-D.jpg

Mike

Click to expand...

My floating rotors have over 55,000 miles on them. They rattle as loud as my clutch and people think they are ready to spin off the bike but....so far no damage or excessive wear! I'll probably replace buttons this summer. I wanted to switch to "quiet" rotors but everyone says not to. I've never ridden an SS w/ non floaters so I can't say they are better at stopping.

These are some replica rotors for the Superlight and F.E. cast iron discs that I am in the process of doing for my bike and some mates. Mine were so worn that the bike failed it's last warrant of Fitness inspection.

These replicas are made out of 7075-T6 Alloy. While this is a very expensive material compared to the original material they will be both much harder wearing and much stronger than original.

I have done a bit of machining out of 7075-T6 before (including race car hubs with integrated disc carriers) and for most items it doesn't present any extra difficulties compare to softer grade alloys normally used for motorcycle parts. But we struck real issues with these that was a result of the large diameter and thinner section. It proved necessary to stress relieve these at several interim machining steps along the way to achieve better than factory dimensional accuracy. We also got different results when starting with billet plate and billet roll. These issues came as a real surprise to us! After a bit of a learning curve our CNC guy has the process sorted. I now understand why the factory ones were made out of soft alloy!

I am using a proprietary two step anodising/colouring process on these that allows us to hard anodise them to further improve their wear properties and achieve a very close match to the original colour.

Hopefully the hard anodising and the 7075-T6 should give at least twice the life of the originals.

All the rotors from my first batch have now been hard anodised and this is a picture of the first disc that has also gone through the second stage colouring process. The colour is not a perfect match but then again their doesn't seem to have been perfect consistency in the original carriers. I have two sets of originals here that are distinctly different gold colours.

If we had tried to gold anodise the 7075-T6 alloy that we used for these discs we would have got a different gold colour from the original gold anodising on the softer 6000 series alloy because the type of alloy used effects the colouring. In addition it is impossible to hard anodise in gold. (You can only achieve much darker colours).

I was determined to use a much harder and stronger alloy than the original soft alloy AND to hard anodise them to give these a diamond hard finish that would have a much longer wear life than the originals.

Subsequent to the hard anodising we are using a proprietary colouring process on these that allows us to hard anodise them and achieve a reasonably close match to the original gold colour. I am thrilled with how this process has turned out. The final gold finish is very tough and chemically resistive We did some scratch testing on the gold finish today and I can report it is toughter than the gold finsh on the original sets we used for comaparison ....and of course underneath ours is also the hard anodising and the 70575-T6 Ergal. It's belts and braces and braces...These should last many years longer than the original two sets I wore out on my bike.

Here is a picture of the result.

Just got the rest of the carriers back from the second stage of the hard anodizing/coloring process. We tweaked the process slightly from the sample shown in my previous post above and we now have an excellent colour match with the originals (except these ones are hard anodized as well).

I have already mounted up my old cast iton rotors on to the carriers. I Couldn't be happier with the finished product.

I doubt I will notice any difference in braking - but it will be great to have the peace of mind that the old assemblies aren't going to fly apart when I need them most.

Kiwihame said:

Well done Liam. Outstanding result!

Click to expand...

Thanks Hamish, it's only taken me four and half years since I first started discussing it! and about 9 months since we decided to go ahead and order the billet alloy.

We ran into real difficulties when I stipulated a spec of:

• Must be machined out of much tougher 7075-T6 instead of 6000 series alloy.
• Must be equal to or better than OEM run out tolerance (Having machined 7075-T6 hubs for my race car with integrated disc carriers previously with no problem, I thought this was going to be the easy part. Difficulties arose when we discovered that machining 7075-T6 in a dinner plate profile caused us a set of dimensional stability difficulties I have never encountered before and I didn't first believe. We even experimented with starting with plate Billet vs satrting with a big billet roll before licking this problem.
• Must be hard anodised - otherwise they wouldn't last much longer than the originals.
• Must colour match the originals (normally mutually exclusive to hard anodising and it took us several attempts using the propretary system to get the colour match really good.

If I had known how frustrating it was going to be I would never have opened my big mouth. Anyway we now have the process licked!

MitchB said:

Maybe I'm not the only one who is confused:

Moto through CorseDynamics was originally going to do a run of these if a minimum order was placed...

Then FastBikeGear stepped in and said they are now making them.

This is two different Vendors?
The carriers from FastBike Gear sound fine. Are they avail for sale to customers yet? Price?

Click to expand...

Many people will recall that I did quite a bit of research on making these carriers and floated my ideas a long time ago on this forum of doing them out of a 7075-T alloy and swapped technical ideas with several other people on this forum. I decided to make some of these for myself and I also offered to do them for anyone else who wanted them at the same time because setting up just for one set was very expensive. My original thread started under the username (wobblyas) I used before I went into business was removed from Ducati.ms as I was not a paying sponsor of this forum and it was understandably viewed as a potentially commercial venture. I was told it could be reinstated if I paid money which I declined as I never intended it as commercial venture. (We make our money selling bulk volumes of items - a very small percentage of which I design/develop - primarily made by other companies).

Subsequently a company started a thread offering to also make discs made out of 7075-T6 and I stopped researching/development for manufacture with the intention of just buying a set for myself from them. But at my bikes last Warrant of Fitness test I was advised that they would fail my bike at it's next test if I didn't replace the carriers, and because replacement replicas still wern't available from anyone I decided to just go ahead and make a set for myself. I have done lots of similar projects before and I thought I could just get them run off between other projects in a couple of weeks.

I do a lot of stuff that I promote and give away for free via the forums like my free Ignitech manual. (email me if you want a free copy), A lot of the stuff I manufacture for my own project bike, like my exhausts, and twin spark head that I will not manufacture for other people (no don't even bother asking as a refusal is often deemed offensive) but I post images, etc in case other people want to copy them and becasue I enjoy the interaction and valuable input from other guys doing similar things and of course I like to show off my stuff and my bike. I gain a lot of inspiration for projects from other forum members. To me this is what the motorcylcing culture and forums are about.

I posted some images and details in this thread of the carriers I was making because my original thread had been removed and I knew the project would be of interest to others. I was contacted by Titax of MotoGP/WSBK fame (who I have done some work for in the past) re these carriers two days ago and I am happy to supply them with our CAD/CNC files free of charge so that they can do a volume production run and sell them through their channels - but I have also cautioned them that while a lot of people show interest, the total market is probably about 20 sets - which is probaby why today as far as I know am the only person in the world who has ever actually made a replica set of these carriers. (If you don't specifically want a replica set there are of course much better designs for floating discs such as Brembo's T-Drive carriers/rotors). The only detail I have not been able to share is the two stage hard anodising/colouring process. I tried to take some photos of this process and the plant that does this for us when I picked up the finished carrriers earlier this week, but when I asked permission to take photos to post on line, I was advised politely and firmly that theirs is a proprietary process.

To keep costs down for my set I just bit the bullet and went ahead and made three more sets of these carriers at the same time because I had one other person who had requested me to make a set for them and I thought I could probably sell the other two sets. I did not promote pricing or offer to sell them in this forum because of the previous concern by this forum's admin. (but I did offer them for sale in other forums and one of the administrators of Ducati 851 and 888 Forum invited me to promote them in their forum after he learned of them from a member of www.ducatiforum.co.ukand. Most of us who are passionate about Ducatis are members of other Ducati forums. I can confirm that while there has been a lot of interest in this project through the other forums, understandably few people were willing to commit to a purchase once I offered them for sale.

At some stage with any project like this you have to decide whether to take the plunge and financial risk, as the brits say you have to either piss or get off the pot. Once you make the commitment to proceed, the development work starts. With modern design and manufacturing tools a low volume project is lot more simple and cost effective on a small scale than it used to be. First you do your feasibility and materials research. The you create the item in software such as SolidsWorks and then send it to 3D printer to give you a physical item that you can bolt into place and check your fit and tolerances, ect, Then you machine one out of soft cheap alloy to validate your CNC files/ tooling/mounting jigs. Then you machine a sample out of the material you are going to use for production. (In our case at this stage we discovered real issues that took some experimentation and many attempts to resolve). Having done this you do a small production run. Next you use some samples from the same parent billet stock to test and tune your anodising /colour match. Different batches of stock and even the same batches of stock on different days if all environmental conditions arn't perfectly controlled will vary the colour matching.

However once you have the process fully sorted it is relatively easy to run off more pieces.

For me (even the development took longer than expected) this has been a fantastically satisying project and I am proud of the end result and keen to show it off. I now have exactly the quality of item I wanted on my bike and I managed to spread the costs a little by suppling three other sets.