Fitted carbon fiber sunroof delete

[Bull Run]

Anyone interested in a fitted carbon fiber sunroof delete panel for Fiestas? Northwind Composites makes fitted sunroof delete panels for other makes, so I reached out to see what it'll take to make them for Fiesta STs. In a nutshell, the initial order requires around 5-10 units at a price of $450 to $475/each range. Lee at Northwind Composites responded quickly with details so that's a good sign.

Reply below if you a interested. If I get five more more interested folks (myself included), I'll write Lee on details on getting this rolling if five (myself included) or more folks are interested.

E-mail response from Lee (lee@northwindcomp.com) at Northwind Composites

In terms of making a delete for your ST, we don’t currently have a mold for your chassis. To properly get a new production mold online it takes roughly 6-8 weeks and about $5k. We typically absorb these costs internally with the intention that the deletes will sell over a couple years and pay off the tooling without creating a large mark up to the customers. The tooling is really the lynch pin to most composite projects as takes a quality tool to produce a quality part. We have the process dialed in, but, it still takes a bit of resources to make a production mold. Unfortunately at present the ST isn’t one of the chassis lines we’re trying to spool up for right now. It’s a solid car for sure and it definitely fits within performance market we try to hit, we just haven’t really gotten into the Ford chassis lines yet.

We do have a path which allows for a cheaper tooling path, roughly $2.5k but this path produces a mold which is only good for 6-10 parts before the mold surface begins to fail. We have done this with a couple customers but as the mold is not a production mold, it falls into the custom work realm and the customer needs to cover the cost of the tooling. If this is a path you are interested in, please let me know and I’ll walk through the details in a bit more depth.

To more directly answer your question of how many orders it takes to make it worthwhile, I look to have 5-10 orders off the bat. It takes more than that to pay off the tooling as we really don’t markup the deletes very much in an effort to keep the affordable. But, that’s what I look for to help determine if the market makes sense to spend the time and money to tool for. Additionally, as a company position, I don’t manage group buys. If a customer wants to manage a group buy and get things rolling or pursue the low volume mold, I’m happy to help. However, managing group buys directly is always a little problematic from a company perspective.

Second reply

Yes, you can certainly share my email with the Fiesta community. Assuming you’re sunroof opening is standard-ish size, you’re going to be in the $450-$475 range. Keep in mind that price doesn’t include a clear coat – which we do recommend and is something that we leave to our customers.

 

[Woods247]

I’m thinking about it. I’ll make a decision and post up in a few days.

 

[DangerMouse]

count me in. I’ve been wanting one for years.

 

[Jabbit]

My new chassis doesn't have a sunroof but this is a great find. Good luck!

 

[M-Sport fan]

I purposely ordered this car without a sunroof just in case I ever wanted to/was able to by situation turn it into an open track, or rally car.

At the very least, I figured it would prevent leaks, never rattle, and is a slight bit less weight at the very highest point of the car.

 

[Woods247]

I saw one of these on an E36 M3 today. It’s worth the cost.

 

[Bull Run]

There are at least five of us interested in this between here and the Facebook group, so I sent them an e-mail about the next steps. If you want pictures of the panel installed on other cars, Google "northwind composites sunroof delete".

 

[ronniec687]

I may be interested in this as well.

 

[Bull Run]

Here's a follow up e-mail from Lee. I like that he provided a detailed explanation on the whole process as I had no idea on the effort required for carbon fiber work (the blurb about the whole roof is for a question posed in the Facebook group). I'll share the link to this thread with him so he can gauge the interest.

*****
Good morning. I’m glad to hear that some of the excitement is building.

With regards to taking pre-orders, it’s not something I do. The market is either there and I trust it, or it’s not. The tooling process takes 3-4 months from when we kick it off until we have a mold and a trim periphery established and can ship out parts. I do not like taking money for non-custom work unless I have a part ready to ship. I particularly don’t like hanging onto it for several months. If you want to send me a link or two to the places folks are getting onboard I would love to read the discussion and see if there is anything I can add.

In terms of replacing the entire roof, it’s not something I typically like to sign up for. There are several issues ranging from simple mold storage space, to cost, and actual mold fabrication complexity. Making a production mold requires an original of whatever we’re making a part to replace. Getting a full car roof to work off of is not super easy for us in small town north Idaho and it doesn’t lend well to our current process.

As I’ve mentioned, tooling is labor and material intensive. One of the ways we reduce the labor is by leveraging a little technology to minimize the hand work time. All of our deletes use a female mold so that the mold surface, the smoothest and geometry controlled surface, is the exterior/windswept surface. This means we have to start with a male plug which is used to make the female mold. The male plug is functionally the factory glass with 2-3 inches extended where the contours match the glass and then another 1-2 inches of flange to support the infusion process. We used to make the male plug by taking the actual glass, mounting it to a board, and then used bondo to extend the contours. This works well but takes a lot of hand work time. Nowadays we take the factory glass, ship it to a vendor who then laser scans the glass, and gives us a 3D model of exterior surface. We then modify the 3D model to include our extra inches of contour and flange. At that point in time we put some high density foam on our large CNC and machine the male plug. This gives us a nice accurate plug and removes all the hand labor.

Once the male plug is machined, we paint it with a high build primer which lets us sand it nice and smooth to give a good surface for the mold layup. Next we layup and infuse the mold facesheet on the male plug with a high temp epoxy tooling resin. Once that’s gone through an initial cure we bond a structure to the back of the face sheet to keep it stable and then the whole mold goes into our oven for a 250deg. F post cure. Finally, we trim up the sides of the mold and cut/polish it to give us our final mold surface. We have some pictures of this tooling process on our Instagram account if you’re interested.

It’s a process and we have it dialed in, but, it still takes a bit of time. Our automotive work only accounts for 15-20% of our business and we have to slip new molds in amongst our other contract work. This is why it typically takes 3-4 months to get a new mold online if we’re busy with other work. We push on the new molds as hard as we can but our custom and contract work typically takes precedent.

Hopefully this helps explain our position on new molds and the hurdles we’re up against. While our other work pays most of the bills, I personally really like the automotive work. There’s a lot of passion in cars and I love being a small part of all the cool builds customers. It’s why I still like bringing new chassis online and working with actual people for the car work.

Please let me know if you have any questions or there is anything else I can do right now to help. As before, you’re welcome to share this email with others as well.