Most people know Tag Heuer for their high-end watches, but I’ll bet you didn’t know they also make eyewear (a large variety available here on eBay).  In Spring of 2009, Tag Heuer will be releasing their new C-Flex eyeglasses, utilizing carbon fiber:

The glasses will have auto adjustable flexible temples, made all from carbon fiber.  The carbon fiber allows the glasses to be 10 times more resistant and 75% lighter than steel.  It will not suffer from lengthening, creep, functional fatigue, or corrosion.  Any of the parts that need to be metal utilize titanium.  No pricing information is available yet, but we’re looking forward to seeing these.

Here’s a few other Tag Heuer glasses on eBay:

Do you fall into the realm of high-end golfer?  Do you have that $100,000+/year club membership?  When you’re not riding around in your cart, it’s time to step up your game and be the talk of the club with the Mantis carbon fiber caddy.

Mantis is made by a German company named Carbon Functions, and they have quite the product on their hands.  There are three different versions of the caddy; Sport, High End, and Premium, each with about €1,000 difference (about $1,250 in today’s market).  The caddy, made of carbon fiber and aircraft aluminum weigh in at just about 7kg (15.5 lbs).

The design allows the golf caddy to be very stable and lightweight…important aspects when lugging your clubs around.

To be the talk of the club, be prepared to dish out the platimum Amex.  The sport model starts at €2,990 ($3,750), and the premium model is €4,990 ($6,250).  The Mantis website states that this is available starting in February of 2008, so you’ll have to contact them to get one.

Check out the promo video for the Mantis, it’s certainly the most suspenseful golf caddy video I’ve personally ever seen:

[Source: BornRich]

One of our good friends, Rory Craig, who is a student at the Art Center College of Design, has designed a sweet carbon fiber baby car seat prototype.  He developed the prototype as a Sparco product (and is trying to pitch the concept to them), with the idea of a race-inspired child seat for those car enthusiast fathers that want to get their kid a really unique baby seat.

The entire body is carbon fiber that was done with a wet layup over a cnc’d foam core. The seat is not only extremely lightweight strong, but suits the needs of all three stages a child goes through when using a carseat. The first is a rear facing infant seat, the second and upright forward facing toddler seat, and third a youth booster seat. This carseat achieves this by having a central pivot that is not only adjustable but also removable to allow for these three different configurations. By combining all these stages it allows the buyer to not have to purchase three different carseats throughout the childs carseat years. Note that this design is purely conceptual and does not fully function.

All straps are Sparco race harnesses and all plastic insert and parts were made using rapid prototyping machines. Interior is fully padded and snaps out of carbon shell for washing. The many holes down the back of the seat allow for harness adjustment as the child grows.

The project was done for a fourth term product design class where the assignment was to design a softgood product (Rory based this on the interior).  Here’s some info from Rory regarding the development and cost:

The class is 14 weeks long, however when we walk into the class we have no idea what we are going to design, I actually didn’t know i was going to design a carseat until about the 5th week of class. I did lots of ideation and computer models for the next 2-3 weeks and then came up with a final design. Once I had completed the design on the computer I sent out the files to be cnc’d, by a local company. It cost $2300 just for the machining. I then met someone at cerritos college in LA to help me do a wet layup over the foam parts. Him and I worked solid for the next 2-3 weeks, fiber glassing first then bondo, sanding making sure the surface was smooth. Then we applied the carbon, which was donated to me by cerritos college. We finished the carbon with a acrylic urethane. I have never done more sanding in my life. I had concepts for the interior and took it to a local car interiors place, called henkel’s upholstery in pasadena. The grand total of the seat was around $4K, alot more than i wanted to spend, but the resulting presentation piece was well worth it.

Rory branded the prioduct as a Sparco Wingman seat, he even created a poster to help the overall package:

I was in Monte Carlo a few months back and caught this mom in her Ferrari F430 with the baby in the passenger seat…what a perfect product this would have been!

In the past we’ve written about Weds 100% carbon fiber wheel, but this is not something that is used in production at this time.  Currently, the only real option I know about for a real carbon fiber production wheel is from Dymag, which features a carbon fiber outer rim, and a regular wheel face with magnesium hub.  That’s about to change.

Among the manufactures that we met at SEMA this year, HRE announced a partnership with Dymag to create their own set of partially carbon fiber wheels.  Dymag has an exclusive partnership with HRE to produce the outer wheel, so you will only see this with them for now.

For those that don’t know of HRE, they are one of the highest end wheel manufacturers in the world.  You’ll find their wheels on anything from a BMW M3 to a Lamborghini Murcielago.  They are known for making multi-piece forged custom forged wheels with many options to fit your application.

The new carbon fiber wheel is in the final stages of development, and expected to hit the streets in January of 2009.  You’ll be able to find them in both the 590R and 890R styles, which feature forged aluminum centers with titanium hardware.  They will initially be available in both a 19″ and 20″ wheel, and can be expected to cost $2,500-$4,000/wheel ($10,000-$16,000/set), although final price is yet to be determined.

We spoke with Alan Peltier, HRE’s COO to ask him a few questions about the wheels.  The main reason it’s available in only two styles is because of the way they are pre-cut to fit the wheel spoke pattern.  They don’t want to start offering carbon wheels across the board due to the cost, so this is sort of considered an initial test of the market.  On top of that, using the wheel styles with a lot of spokes offers a good amount of structural integrity. The 20 inch wheel is expected to weigh in at just 21lbs.

When we originally wrote about Weds wheels, we saw a lot of people commenting about worries of carbon fiber bursting under some sort of pressure.  Alan posted on a thread at 6SpeedOnline regarding this:

So on to carbon. It turns out that the stiffness of the carbon barrel is actually much higher than the stiffness of the aluminum barrel. In fact, in fatigue, the barrels are load rated MUCH higher than the aluminum center simply because you have to design the rim around impact. Okay… so is it brittle and is it going to shatter into a million pieces under impact. Nope. If you hit a curb or something you’ll definitely damage it, but you’ll have a localized failure which is what you want and should expect.

The way Alan explained it to me at SEMA is that there should be no concerns about the type of damage people where the wheel would basically burst.  The wheels are meant for a street/show application, but Alan also said that there were no problems with taking them onto a track if desired.

We’re looking forward to seeing the final version of the wheels, especially installed on some cars.  While the wheels from SEMA were aluminum, I’d love to see them in a gunmetal color to better match the carbon fiber.  We’ll surely post any updates as we get them.

Apple Insider is reporting that the next generation Apple Air notebook may be replacing some of its aluminum parts with carbon fiber.  For those not in the know, Apple developed the Air as the thinnest notebook in the market, but is apparently not happy about the weight, which comes in at 3 pounds.

Apple Insider has strong sources stating that Apple is seriously looking into replacing various components, more importantly the entire bottom of the case, with carbon fiber.  Just this alone would bring the weight of the laptop down to 2.78lbs.

It’s very possible that this rumor is true.  Apple is known to push the limits in manufacturing, and their laptop is already priced quite high…which should hopefully give them the margins to do some higher end stuff like this.  There is said to already be a pre-production Air out there with the carbon fiber bottom.  While the top is left aluminum, the bottom is now raw black carbon fiber.  If Apple was to continue on this route, there is no word whether or not that look would stay the same.

Apple is not the first to use carbon fiber in their notebooks to reduce weight.  Other companies such as VoodooPC and Sony have recently done the same in production notebooks.  The weight savings is quite apparent, and as costs go down on the sought after material, we’ll likely see it used even more accross the board.