Streamline Carbon is well known for its show room quality finished products, but to get parts ready for lacquer requires a lot of work to prime the surface with a suitable keyed finish. A special blasting process is used to get the optimum key for finishing and ensure a high level of adherence of lacquer to component.

Finished parts are sprayed in either a colour matched paint scheme or clear coat. At present this work is outsourced, but this is only until the Streamline Carbon paint booth comes on line. Finished products are then carefully wrapped and prepared for dispatch, UK and worldwide.

The future holds a lot of opportunities and new ventures for the company. Streamline Carbon already supply parts to a growing international market, with the products being sought after by customers in the Caribbean and Australia as well as all over Europe. A number of company vehicles serve the purpose as show cars and test beds for product research and design. As word spreads and the reputation of the company grows, the orders are coming in greater numbers.

Streamline Carbon is becoming a recognized premium brand, promoting that its products are proudly UK made and unlike many, supplied directly to the end user, cutting out the middleman and offering a cost effective solution for the customer to enjoy the ownership of high quality carbon fibre components on their vehicle.

Of course, the firm is keen to remember its roots, so as well as continuing to develop new products, one of the projects that made the firm notable in the first place still gets attention when time allows, notably Chris Harwood’s carbon fibre bodied Peugeot 106.

More on that in a later feature… Read part one and part two.

Seasons Greetings to you all and welcome to part two of this exclusive look inside Streamline Carbon’s Northamptonshire factory.

Creating moulds for the carbon parts is a time consuming and labour intensive task. For large body panels the process can take several days due to the need for a stepped approach. The first is preparing the original part or pattern for moulding, using wood, fillers and primers and above all, experience. In almost every case there is a degree of prep work to fill and smooth it to make it suitable for the next step of the process, even with newly supplied panels; Mervyn’s old school pattern making eye does not let anything go by. There’s a gallery of some of our moulds in the projects section.

Multiple coatings of an industrial release agent is applied to the part and then, layers of fibreglass and resin are laid-up onto the surface. In some situations fiberglass is all that is needed to be used to make a mould, but in other circumstances the mould itself is made from a tooling pre-preg carbon, essentially in a similar way to the end products. The moulds are made of material far thicker than the end products to ensure that they are strong endure the manufacturing process involving heat and pressure inside the autoclave.

In the laying-up process, a layer of fiberglass sheet and resin is applied. Tools are then used to remove air pockets, which if left in the curing resin would significantly reduce the strength of the finished mould. Once the mould has cured, wedges are then driven between the original part and the mould in order to separate the two. In some cases the part being replicated in carbon is complex enough to require a two part or multiple part mould that needs to be fastened together, if this is not completed accurately, the tool will not allow the component to be released without breaking the part or the mould.

Once the bags of moulds are removed from the autoclave the parts are released from the moulds. This in itself is no simple task as the heat and pressure of the autoclave ensure the parts are set firmly into the tool created for them. Mervyn has an array of tricks to get the parts ready for the next stage of the manufacturing process.

Released parts have a degree of flashing around them that needs to be removed. Diamond coated cutting discs and finger belt sanders are used to trim parts to the necessary shapes. The dust released from cutting carbon is nasty stuff so extraction of the waste is important to maintain a safe working environment.

Cut parts then need to be prepped further by hand, to meet the companies exacting standards for quality. Sometimes things don’t work out and imperfections in the materials or production process mean parts are binned at the quality assurance stage, interestingly product pricing can sometimes require an element of scrap to be built into the process, due to its nature.

Read part one. Part three will be released on New Year’s Day.

On the outskirts of Northampton, in the heartlands of British motorsport lies the home of Streamline Carbon, having established themselves in the performance car scene over the last 5 years supplying components for vehicles taking part in race series through to track days and daily use.

The manufacture and supply of carbon fibre products to the automotive industry is most certainly a growing trend, but not all carbon products are the same. The Streamline Carbon team kindly offered to open their doors and give a behind the scenes look at what happens at their UK facility.

The huge sign on the front of the premises leaves you in no doubt that you have arrived at the right place. Streamline Carbon’s logo is distinctive and has a strong association with high quality, UK manufactured products that take many forms. I am greeted by Mervyn Griffith’s the technical mastermind behind the firm.

Many firms in the industry claim a motorsport heritage, particularly those located in Northamptonshire. The Streamline Carbon link is proudly displayed. Mervyn worked for Williams F1 handcrafting patterns, tools and components during the height of their successes in the 1990s. Photos of Senna, Prost, Hill and Mansell adorn the walls. A technical background in a firm from the pinnacle of racing means that there is vast experience, knowledge and passion invested into every product Streamline produce.

The workshop is divided up into different zones where different elements of the manufacturing process are completed.  The ‘clean room’ is where materials are cut from the pre-preg carbon fibre material to accurate workshop templates that have been designed to lay into the tools for both structural and aesthetic benefits. Christine Harwood (currently mentored by Mervyn) lays the material into the moulds, carrying out the initial stages of work to prepare parts for going under vacuum to be cured in the autoclave or high pressure oven.

Mervyn explains that there is a huge range of different pre-preg materials available. The impregnated resins offer different levels of resistance to heat, so those exhaust surrounds are not made out of the same base materials as things like door cards. They also need to be cured at higher temperatures in the oven. The process is clinical and methodical.

This is the first of a three part exclusive look behind the scenes of Streamline Carbon. Look out for part two at Christmas and the final instalment in the New Year.