Seeing the mosler chassis, i thought about this idea more intensive, because it looks like a smart way to construct i chassis.
I recently discussed this with some friends of mine who are topspecialist within DASA for this kind of applications.
They told me that the don´t know of any case of pure structural construction made of honey comb materials.( Don´t mix it with laminated and in an autoclave baked constructions like F1 chassis)
The said the issue is the nonexisting flexibility within the material. all flexing loads are going on the glue seams and even withing the material as sheer between the layers.
Even the best glues have a point where they just pop of, And this is the main risk and unknown factor with this kind of construction. It certainly holds for a long time
but if it goes, it goes with a big bang and it is gone, there is nothing like a slow process.
So i would say very difficult to control even for the ones with big engineering and computing ressources.
TOM
Hi Aaron,
My intial thoughts had been to go down this route as well and I came to the same conclusion as yourself below too...
What stopped me in the end was trying to get hold of decent reference engineering information. It seems to me the people who know how to do this don't seem too keen on sharing the hard learned knowledge. Which I can understand to a certain extent. There really doesn't seem to be any good books that I could find on the subject either.
I think the best advice is to find a manfacturer of the material who's got good tech support to work with you on how to do things with it.
The other thing is that tube frames are rarely really just a tube frame and properly attached panelling make the things semi-monocoque anyway.
Neil from Race magazine was taking this hybrid approach using sandwich and steel with his project he's gone a bit quiet lately, I hope he's carrying on with it.