Motorsport Fabrication Fundamentals: Step 2: Materials
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Step 2: Materials
02.00
| 00:00 | - When it comes to the material section for this project, there's not too much we need to think about as aftermarket fuel tanks are a very common part and outside of dedicated plastic fuel cells, aluminium is almost universally the material of choice. |
| 00:14 | The advantages are that aluminium is light and obviously it won't suffer from corrosion like mild steel can. |
| 00:21 | We could of course have chosen stainless steel instead but we're just going to be adding weight and expense to the part for no real obvious advantage. |
| 00:30 | The choice of aluminium does influence our construction technique though and to complete this job we obviously need to be able to weld aluminium which requires a TIG welder with AC capability. |
| 00:41 | As we discussed in the body of the course however, quality inverter based TIG welders are becoming increasingly common and the prices continue to fall so these should be a serious consideration for your motorsport fabrication tool box. |
| 00:54 | The next obvious question is what material thickness should we use for this application? Factors to consider here are the required strength and rigidity of the finished product. |
| 01:04 | On face value, there's not a lot of strength that's required however a full tank of fuel is still going to weigh around 40 kg which we need to adequately support without any undue deformation of the tank. |
| 01:16 | Experience here with other alloy fuel tanks has lead us to selecting 3 mm thick sheet which we've seen work adequately for similar applications. |
| 01:26 | The internal walls that we discussed in the previous module will also provide internal support and rigidity which will let us get away with using a thinner material than we perhaps would have if we were using a completely open design for our tank. |
| 01:41 | As for the threaded adaptor plate for the Radium surge tank, we've selected a 10 mm thickness for this. |
| 01:46 | This is sufficient to provide enough material to reliably tap and provide enough strength for the finished threads. |
| 01:53 | With our material choice confirmed, we can now move onto cutting the parts. |
