Making 280mph Capable Carbon Fiber Wheels - /INSIDE KOENIGSEGG

my name is Christian von Koenigsegg 40 years old for half of my life I've been on the quest to be a leader in the hypercar industry utilizing Swedish design combined with visionary technical solutions almost all parts of a Koenigsegg is made out of carbon fiber and we only use the most extreme type of carbon fiber material available which is called prepreg it's the same that's been used in Formula one and fighter jets and spaceships and things like that it's pre impregnated the fiber with two-component epoxy usually it's a weave format so it's woven it can be different types of fibers for different purposes and different type of weave patterns for different purposes and we apply them layer by layer in different thicknesses depending on what part we make and what need we have so right now this is very flexible it's a little bit sticky almost like a sticker decal and we apply it into a negative tool in this case it's a carbon fiber wheel to wear the first the world's first car manufacturer to make carbon fiber wheels actually and it's the most important part a most important area of the car to have really light weight because it's rotational unsprung mass so not only is it bumping up and down it's also rotating so you have to accelerate it and D accelerate it when you're on the throttle and on the brakes and when you're turning you have centrifugal forces getting into the wheels and and disturbing your steering feel and things like that so one of the most important things on a car to make really light and strong and stiff are the wheels and that's why we make them out of carbon fibre ass carbon fiber is the strongest lightest commercially available material there is so what we're seeing here is the layup and we will follow this process through through baking and D molding and polishing so you will see how that happens so we've been producing carbon fiber wheels now for our cars for one and a half year so it means that almost almost twenty sets of wheels have been made in for production cars that all support prototypes and it's something we're very proud of to have this technology in house as well I'm aware we're the only ones in the world making carbon fiber wheels for production cars so what we're seeing here is the first stage and here we're getting to the second stage where we have the other part of the tool which is the the barrel area and as you can see there are several different layouts of thicknesses of carbon and different types of weaves and different types of overlapping and it's very critical to have stiffnesses in this area for handling because you don't want to have even though the wheel is safe you don't want it to flex in this area because it dilutes your camera settings so we pay a lot of attention to have perfect stiffness much different than most racing aluminium wheels even what you don't see here is the very intricate area of the spokes as the spokes are hollow and the center of the wheel is also hollow it's a very special process together make that happen really and it's one of the proprietary technologies we have so we can't show it on camera but now what we're doing is we're packaging this into a vacuum bag to debulk it and compress the material before it's going into the autoclave where it's baked under pressure and the material is compressed together so many people might think this is difficult to balance as it's laid up by hand and you have all these different layers and so on but what we've noticed is that there are intrinsically more balance than casted or forged aluminium wheels what we actually do is we have a the only metal part in the we list is it is the valve to fill up air into the wheel and we have noticed that they we tend to have to put balance on the other side of the wheel to where we have the valve and of course the light wheel is more sensitive to the imbalance of the valve so what we do is actually on the spoke on the opposite side of the valve we put a little bit of like extra ballast carbon fiber there to pre balance the wheel already in production so we need very little waiting on the wheel when we put a tire on of course the tires themselves have some imbalances that we also try to match to the wheels naturally in balance so would they balance each other out so sometimes we take the tire off and on of the wheel to match it as perfectly as possible in order to have it as little dead weight on the wheel as possible yeah so we're now preparing the wheel for Auto claw curing so it's going in a vacuum bag and this is a breather felt to make sure we get a good spread of the pressure over the of the wheel the pressure difference so there are no voids that get stuck what you can see here is probably the coolest part of our wheel is that we have this is a cutout of a spoke and the spokes are actually empty and Hollow even the center of the wheel is hollow and you can see it's also smooth on the inside so we have a very special process to make this happen which we developed together with a wheel and just to understand how strong this wheel is if you do carbon fiber the correct way with the right material the right layup and the right fiber type simply explain you can you can consider the the thickness of the material to be as strong as if it was this thick and made out of steel so then you can imagine how strong a tube section like this is and especially in this area when you see how thick that is so it's an immensely strong and reliable wheel but still extremely lightweight so when it comes to safety aspects and let's say potholes and flat spot and and curbing a wheel like this first of all when it comes to kind of impact from sharp edges like sidewalks and potholes a we like this will survive a much harder impact and a forged aluminium wheel before it loses its air pressure so in from that aspect it's a safer type of wheel and you can't really flat spot it it's either okay or it's it it's damaged and broken but it takes much more force to break it than an aluminum wheel so that's also a good thing when it comes to kind of curbing it and scratching it of course you will break the the nice outer layer weave but as long as it is not too deep you can repair it you might get a visible difference to the wheel but it will still be fine to drive with but as these wheels also are very aesthetically welding the static factory is also very important I would say most people who get really heavy kerb scratching would probably replace and even though it's fine to drive with [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so here we have a final produced wheel and the the finish of the part coming out of the tool is actually so good that we only polish it we don't put a layer of clear coat over it it's no pinholes and perfect tool surface and the nice thing when you polish carbon fiber you get a really distinctive checker defect look for this kind of flip-flop between black and silver it's very distinctive and of course not having clear coat and instead it's just raw carbon it's actually more difficult to scratch it as well it's a harder surface than an acrylic paint would be what do we do is we polish it and wax it with a UV protective kind of wax surface yes to have a little bit of UV protection to it but this type of carbon fiber an epoxy does not yellow all the time so it's taste like this pretty much forever to see from the back side as well so it's just carbon here and it's actually hollow inside you can if you put your finger in here you can feel the hollowness inside the wheel so as I said before the only metal part normally is this valve up here which is not put into place yet so this is a 19 inch high and 10 inch wide the front wheel in the rear we have 20 inch high and 12 point 5 inch wide we before the carbon fiber wheels we had forged aluminum wheels which were very very light the front wheel was around 10 kilos this one is just under 6 kilos it's 5.9 kilos so it's about a 40% weight saving to the lightest forged aluminum wheel there is pretty much so just to show you on camera what that means I can take it in my finger here that's lifted like that not that heavy I think when people hear that we're using carbon fiber wheels they kind of start thinking oh it must be difficult when you hit a curb to make it strong enough for even hot and or sidewalk edges and stuff like that but but that's kind of easy compared to to handle compared to the fact that we have these massive huge breaks generating incredible amounts of heat stopping the car from 300 kilometres to zero in 6.6 seconds it's just a massive generation of heat so in order to cope with that to make sure the wheel withstands that heat we have to work with very special prepreg material it's very special epoxies and after treatment processing to get the wheel to take that heat in a good way so yeah that's that was the biggest challenge and something we're very proud of to have overcome [Music] you

Channel: THE DRIVE

Views: 3,424,707

Rating: 4.893836 out of 5

Keywords: carbon, fiber, wheels, racing, carbon fiber, carbon fiber wheels, rim, motorsports, christian von koenigsegg, koenigsegg, Koenigsegg CCX (Automobile Model), agera r, agera, one:1, One2One, 1one, koengisegg one:1, Carbon-fiber-reinforced Polymer

Id: PGGiuaQwcd8

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 22 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/basketball12345]

Little do we know hes the finger lifting champion of the world.

[u/disturbed_pickle]

Koenigsegg is my favorite car company ever. It all started with one man's passion for the details, and they are quietly breaking new ground. In this video, they were developing an air driven valve to improve gas milage and power, and they built, tested and proved it was feasible and effective.

Yet nobody knows about it. Crazy stuff.

[u/D0natell0]

The /DRIVE channel on Youtube have had some really good technical coverage on Koenigsegg's last two cars (Agera S and the new One:1). It is absolutely worth watching if you are into cars and the technical details behind these super/hyper cars. Here are all the videos:

Series 1: Inside Koenigsegg (Agera S)

Ep 1/9: Carbon Fiber Construction

Ep 2/9: Triplex Suspension Explained

Ep 3/9: Million-Dollar Paint Job

Ep 4/9: Feels Like a Million Bucks

Ep 5/9: The Ultimate Test Drive

Ep 6/9: Inside the Brain of a Swedish Bombshell

Ep 7/9: The Future of the Internal Combustion Engine

Ep 8/9: The 1140 hp Heart of a Hypercar

Ep 9/9: Putting 1140 hp to the Ground

Series 2: Inside Koenigsegg (One: 1)

Ep 1: The 1360HP Heart of the Koenigsegg One:1

Ep 2: One:1 Active Rear Wing

Ep 3: 3D Printing: Titanium, Carbon Fiber & The One:1

Ep 4: Making 280mph Capable Carbon Fiber Wheels

• Edit: Fixed title on Ep 2/9.

[u/seekoon]

How do you become one of the guys who is shaping the wheel?

[u/DragonBallsOfSteel]

Cool stuff. Carbon fiber is a tough material to work with in my experience (Protip, don't touch it with your bare hands, you'll get painful micro splinters.) Maybe x-post to /r/artisanvideos

[u/theramennoodle]

How expensive would a carbon fiber wheel like this cost?

[u/loveisakeyblade]

Damn that really says a lot about how light carbon fiber is. It's so light they have to "imbalance" the wheel because the air valve is too heavy.

[u/PositivePoster]

Hey, really nice post!

[u/[deleted]]

Its like a work of art, amazing. These videos are on reddit often but i never fail to watch them and i'm impressed every time.