REAL Carbon Fiber Camaro Hoods-12lbs!

[dinoKeymaster]

StormKing – Gary Smrtic And Bill have perfected their latest Carbon Fiber Project. Heres the Deal In Gary’s Own Words:
” …there’s people out there selling “carbon fiber” hoods for around $600.00. They are liars and frauds, the material cost alone on these hoods is over $700.00! Not the resin either, just the carbon cloth! So these frauds put like one layer of carbon, do the rest of the hood in the same crappy fiberglass and cheap resins, and call it a carbon hood. The proof is when asked what they weigh, they say 25lbs. . Factory hood, 66lbs. “racing” fiberglass hood, 32lbs. Our carbon fiber hood, 12lbs, and even at that, we could’ve made it a bit lighter, and we will on the next one.
So the only way we can market is to do it ourselves, and call these other frauds out. That’s exactly what I’m planning on doing, too! About this car in photo – the car ran a best of 8.04 before we did this project. I asked the owner, ‘did you make any other changes, any other changes at all. other than installing our parts?” He said no, not one thing. The car ran a 7.89, and four full miles per hour faster than it ever went before. it is now the fastest small block Chevy ever, in this class, which is Extreme Street. So I guess Bill and I know a little bit about what we’re doing!”

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[storm-king]

Wow. Thanks for the promo, Dino!
Yes, Bill and I have been playing with aerospace grade composites for some time. I spent 30 years in the aerospace industry, primarily in composites. I built the B1-B Bomber, Space Shuttle, etc, you know, all the latest additions to our national museums!
But after that, Bill and I started doing car pieces, Top Fuel wings, Dodge Viper parts, Some different Ferrari parts, etc. WE even did the carbon fiber internal engine parts that NHRA outlawed a few seasons ago. In fact, they outlawed our wings, too!
We worked on the Dodge Pro Stock Truck program through Roy Simmons and Patterson racing, which was about the same time we started doing some things for John Lingenfelter.(Great, great, guy, and a terrible tragedy in his passing).
So this Camaro hood has an airbox that is a seperate piece under the hood that incormprates some of the things we learned from the P/S truck program. We’ve done better stuff, we were just on a very short time table to do this project, and it’s really not up to our usual standards. We’ll remedy that on the next hood out of the tool though. I expect it to be about an addition 2-3 lbs lighter, and stonger stil than this first one.
We also built the trunk extension for this car, which wieghed 24 pounds. Our carbon piece wieghs 4 lbs.
We’ve got another model Camaro factory hood, I couldn’t tell you what year, its a Chevy, after all, and they all look the same to me…:) But its that one with the really sloped nose. We’ll do a hood for that too, using basically the same scoop, and see if anyone is intersted in buying them.
They won’t be inexpensive, and we aren’t even going to try to be cometitive with our pricing, because we can’t be. But if people see ours, compare the strength and stiffness and weight to what other guys are pushing off on them as carbon fiber, we think they’ll buy ours…
Ours, again, are real 100% carbon fiber, vacuum bagged, oven cured, and 100% epoxy. They are, quite simply, the best you can buy.
Thanks for the use of the soap box, Dino.
Bill is away starting tomorrow for a trip back up to New York for a week with our Mom (90 years old November 6th), who, incidently, drove our max wedge a few times in ’64 at Dover. Benny Cardillo showed her no mercy!

[dinoKeymaster]

My pleasure Gary…that’s what this forum heading is about…”Business News’ and most importantly if it can benefit our guys or their friends. For you new guys Gary ,Bill and the Smrtic “Storm King’ history are forever embedded in the Dover Heritage. Just Put ‘Storm King’ or ‘Smrtic’ in the search feature, but be prepared to pack a cooler & lunch…You’ll get an education….with now 28000 posts in 2800 topics….it’s all here someplace. So Gary …What are you & Bill going to call your C/F Motorsports venture?

[storm-king]

We’re stil working on that, Dino. I want to do a re-hash of our first good venture, “Factory Ten” Engineering.
Bill and I are warbird enthusiast, and Bill and I and his son over the years have met and spoken with most of the surviving members of an obscure group of mercinaries known offically as the “American Volenteer Group”, and popularly as “The Flying Tigers”. We know quite a bit of their history as well, and they used to assemble the airplanes in China at a place called, “Factory10”. So we chose it years ago for our company.
Bill is less enthused about refreshing that brand for a number of reasons, so I’m working on some but still haven’t found one that really does it for me.
“Superior Racing Composites”, or SRC, might work. I could work the brand name into advertising narrative when comparing our stuff to the cheap crap out there already.
When he gets back from N.Y. we’re going to have to have a serious discussion and pick sumpthin’!

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