The Real Deal

Welcome to 666 Road Racing’s “Real Deal” section…

Here we will try to explain the differences between resins, materials and methods used to produce motorcycle racing bodywork and why our products are the real deal. If you have found this page and have a spare five minutes, sit down and read the next three pages – it won’t just educate you to the World of fibreglass and carbon fibre, it might just save you a fortune!

Polyester vs Epoxy

Virtually all bodywork manufacturers in the UK and across Europe use polyester resins. This is because they are the cheapest form of resin available and also the easiest to use. They are a very crude form of resin, and require a gel coat. This gel-coat not only adds unnecessary weight, which is always an issue on a racing bike, but also they shatter if bent or hit hard. This is because the polyester gel-coats have no flex. This problem is often seen in fibreglass motorcycle kits. Any problems encountered removing the product from an inferior mould, or if the kit is bent in transit or trying to fit it, will result in a shattered gel-coat. These are often seen as spider like webs across the surface. Any fractures weaken the component.

Gel-coats are easily spotted on motorcycle fibreglass kits as they are often white or black in colour. On carbon fibre, clear gel-coats are usually used. Polyester gel-coats however always give away their presence as a blueish tinge. An example of this can be seen in the following image;

This is an example from a well know manufacturer of carbon fibre products. If we tired to bend this cover, the gel would shatter like a piece of Perspex.

Polyester resins cost pennies and when used with fibreglass chop strand matt produce components for very little money. This is why this combination of materials is a popular choice amongst manufacturers. A common trick used by some manufacturers of these products is to apply a woven material on top of the chop strand matt fibreglass to make them more structural and cosmetically appealing. In essence, they are still incredibly crude and weak. They also weigh an awful lot, with a typical gel-coat adding anything up to 2 kilo’s in weight! How do we know this? – we have made samples as tests for strength and weight.

Epoxy on the other hand is a far more advanced resin. It has considerably more flexibility and toughness and succeeds in applications that require the component to withstand massive weights and forces such as those experienced in Formula 1 or structural engineering. Epoxy resin does not need a gel-coat, and therefore doesn’t suffer the same problems as polyester such as spider cracking on the surface or ‘blue tinge’. A typical carbon fibre product produced in epoxy resin will have much higher clarity, far better strength and will be considerably lighter!

This image is a sample of 666 epoxy prepreg autoclaved carbon fibre. You can see how clear it is with the epoxy resin. It can also be bent without shattering the component. It also weighs less than half of a wet-lay up polyester version with gel-coat!

Several manufacturers in the UK are now selling epoxy kits on top of their normal polyester range. Many of these are imported from the Far East where labour is cheap and relatively unskilled. They are all wet-lay manufactured, which we discuss in section 3 of this guide. As you will read, wet-lay up manufacturing is incredibly crude and certainly does not warrant the additional price tags they display!

There are epoxy kits, and there are 666 epoxy kits…!

At 666 we only use epoxy resins in all of our bodywork and carbon fibre products. We do not cut corners on quality, and do not try to rip people off with inferior wet-lay up epoxy products that cost very little to manufacture.