Making a stamp die?

Maybe I am off base here but it looks like something that you could hydroform pretty easy. Might not be completely perfect out of a two piece but it would be a few bondo swipes away and some paint.

We are talking mild steel here or Aluminum.

If you are serious about making customs tanks and on the fence about putting in the investment, I can tell you this - there is money to be made selling to the Ducati/Aprilia crowd. A TON of those bikes came with plastic tanks that swell and there is no real good alternative other than replacing with a new plastic tank.

What about a simple steel tank with a thin fiberglass cover in the shape you want.

Here is the deal with making the parts yourself...

There is a saying that if you own a business, you need to spend time ON the business and not IN the business.

Having been through a few start-ups, I have learned this to be very true.

I was all set to make a custom fiberglass tank for my cafe racer but then gave up when I found that there were no good resins to use. I was thinking that you could make a tank and put a bag inside as a liner ( like they use with racing fuel cells).

Btw: I have swelling on my plastic ducati monster tank. This is a new replacement tank that was coated with caswell by the dealership before ever having any fuel put into it. Not sure if it is worse the the Standard ducati dent that my two steel tanked monster sported.

I'm probably never going to do it, there's just too many other things I need to do. I was just blue skying ways something like this might be done on a shoestring budget.

Hydroforming is a cool technique, its one drawback (as near as I can tell) in a situation like this is the deep drawn shape would leave a lot of wrinkles around the bottom. That was what led me to the two part cast steel die idea. It also must be done with a very high degree of accuracy, leaks of the press fluid can not only damage the final product but the pressures involved can maim or kill quickly.

Also, you could make your own from fiberglass/CF, using the correct epoxy resin it wont give any problems.

The correct answer to this is to go buy a 3D metal printer. All you need to do then is scan and hit print. No need to do any welding since it can print cavities.

The beauty of this technology is that you can pay off the machine by doing a variety of tanks and the actual volume does not come into play...as a matter of fact, the more one-off the better. Plus, you can do a variety of other jobs with zero tooling changes needed.

I believe that one of the jet engine manufacturers is planning to use 3D printing to make turbine blades, so its not like the integrity is not there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zApmGFDA6ow

Kenny_McCormic wrote: Also, you could make your own from fiberglass/CF, using the correct epoxy resin it wont give any problems.

Up until a year ago I worked for a company that made industrial pollution control equipment. 75% of what we did was in FRP that was used in a corrosion proof environment (the rest was nickel alloys). I had the head of the R&D lab from Interplastics in our facility to help us optimize our process. This was right around the time I was building my café racer and asked him about to recommend a resin to make a custom tank and he told me that at the 100% saturation that a tank is going to see, that there just was not any good resins to use. The ethanol made it worse. It will hold up for a little while, but not last.
I think on my next project I am going to have a friend make me a aluminum tank and hide it under a fiberglass cover (like my old FZR had).

In reply to Rusnak_322:

Noted.

NOHOME wrote: The correct answer to this is to go buy a 3D metal printer.

Something tells me spending 7-8 figures on a metal 3d printer plus the obscene materials cost might put a tiny little stop to that plan.

Cheap metal prints have porosity issues IMO.

In reply to NOHOME:

We 3D print stuff here at work.

I can assure you that we are not printing anything close to blades. The metallurgy is not there. Our stuff is still very special. The 3D printed stuff is for not-very-strong stuff. Not saying it couldn't work for tanks, but I would seriously doubt any turbine blades/buckets/rotors at this time.

I'm not seeing 3D print being the answer either. The tank would need to be somewhere in the 16-18 gauge area, plenty rigid in mild steel but I can see it would be a bear to print, particularly with the temps involved. I mean, how else would you get the steel shaped?

Plus all this keeps coming back to it being a backyard cottage industry type thing, not sure I want to invest $100k. In fact it'll probably never happen.

The mention was made earlier of hardwood blocks, that's kinda a neat idea, I've made small stuff by making a wooden 'buck' then tapping the panel into shape over it. It does take a lot of time, patience and definitely skill. On a single tank a guy's making for himself yeah I can see this but if making a small production run no it suddenly becomes not real workable, unless subbed out to India or China or whatever.

About that, too: there's plenty of horror stories out there where people have gone to these offshore manufacturers, set the whole thing up for whatever widget then almost instantly find there are things being sold below their cost and behind their backs made from the plans etc they supplied. Not much they can do about that, either; how you gonna stop it?

I also considered casting a set of dies from aluminum but from what I see they would be prone to scratch damage that would show in the final product. That's what got me thinking the dies could be cast from steel instead.

You could always use this as an excuse to learn the black art of gas welding aluminum. That's likely how this was done back in the day.