Carbon floor trays for karts: Details and manufacturing processes - TKart

1 INTRODUCTION

Kart floor trays, in addition to their practical support function and the aesthetic role of their graphics, also have an important part to play in vehicle set-up, especially concerning the kart’s torsion, whose crucial point is precisely in the area in front of the seat where the front and rear axle are connected and precisely where the floor tray gets installed. During turns, the front and rear of the kart tend to position themselves on planes with different slope angles to allow the tyres to sit better on the asphalt. A more or less rigid floor tray, therefore, influences the kart’s setup and behaviour.
Therefore, despite its apparent simplicity, a good floor tray must be studied in detail and made with quality materials and processes, paying particular attention to matters of weight (reduced), resistance, rigidity and torsion. Among floor tray producers, NEK is certainly on the cutting edge and its products are winning the consensus of many kart manufacturers and drivers. Let’s discover its secret.

The view “from below” of the Birel Art chassis clearly shows the floor tray’s position and its anchoring points to the chassis

The carbon floor tray made by NEK for Birel Art

NEK carbon floor tray with DR Racing graphics

2 CARBON

NEK floor trays are made of carbon fibre, a material that’s both very light and rigid, but difficult to treat and more expensive than steel, both for the material itself and the longer and more complex manufacturing process.
Also, to be sure of obtaining a floor tray that’s durable and present constant characteristics from one piece to the next, no expenses may be spared in the manufacturing process.

The “NEK Black” floor tray exalts the structure and colour of carbon fibre. NEK’s product range includes five levels of hardness depending on the layers of carbon used

3 MATERIALS

In the world of composite materials, the choice offering the greatest qualitative guarantees is certainly that of “prepreg.” In the case of carbon, prepreg is simply carbon fibre that’s pre-impregnated industrially with a specific resin. This process makes it possible to obtain fibre sheets impregnated with constant quantities of resin, whose typology and quantity can be chosen. Every piece in a particular batch thus has the exact same material, type of resin, and, above all, amount of resin per square centimetre. The same thing can also be said, save imperfections in the productive process, for the mechanical characteristics of the finished product.
The cheapest alternative to prepreg is the manual process of lamination, in which resin is applied to the fibre by brush. Clearly, this method cannot guarantee that each individual product has a constant amount of resin per square centimetre and, consequently, the same mechanical characteristics. Additionally, manual lamination frequently produces air bubbles in the resin which generate weak points in the structure, compromising the component’s mechanical resistance.

To prevent the resin impregnated in the fibre from hardening, prepreg sheets must be conserved in refrigerated cells at a low temperature. This hardening, however, can only be delayed for a certain period of time

The pre-impregnation of carbon fibre has high costs, both for the material itself and the manufacturing process

THE IMPORTANCE OF CARBON FLOOR TRAYS FOR KARTS