(25 Apr 04)

It's usually such a complicated and expensive business to create glass fibre composite body panels that very few mainstream manufacturers bother. But the industry has been working hard on the R&D, not least via a group called the Automotive Composites Consortium, of which DaimlerChrysler, Ford and General Motors are members.

There are some quite jokey names involved in the project. After the original research work, the ACC brought what it calls P4 (Programmable Powdered Preforming Process) towards regular production status, and Ford's version became known as F3P, for Programmable Preform Process.

Its first use wasn't by Ford itself, but by Aston Martin, which has used it to produce strong and lightweight body panels for the V12 Vanquish and the DB9.

Basically, a robot sprays the glass fibres onto a screen. The next stage is preforming in the shape of the required body panel, followed by melting, curing and cooling before the panel is ready to be fitted.

Ford says that, "Previous to the development of F3P, production of large preforms for automotive component composites was too expensive and time-consuming to be viable at high levels of production. F3P reduces the cost and improves the quality."

It has now come to an agreement with French company Sotira which will allow the F3P process - for a price - to be used by companies outside the Ford group.

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