The Los Angeles area is home to a plethora of composite-related companies. We flew in to spend the day with Tecnocraft, a company known for developing carbon fiber parts for high-end cars such as Lamborghini’s. Even more precisely, they specialize in developing and manufacturing dry carbon fiber parts, a much stronger method of making parts over its wet counterpart. Tecnocraft will be guest blogging here in the future to discuss more technical aspects of carbon fiber, such as the differences between wet and dry carbon fiber, so be sure to stay tuned.

We were given a full tour of their two facilities, where everything from CNC machining aluminum parts to carbon fiber manufacturing is done in-house. We were shown some amazing examples of parts they’ve done which were extremely strong and lightweight. There is a good amount of proprietary solutions being used in the development of parts to ensure they are the best of the best.

We happened to come in on a day where PPI sent over a pair of Razor tuned Audi R8’s that Tecnocraft developed carbon fiber seats for. PPI themselves have dressed the R8’s in plenty of carbon fiber, it was an eyeful for us to see.

The seats that Tecnocraft built and designed are made from 100% dry carbon fiber, and are surprisingly very comfortable. We took about a 30 minute ride to BBI Autosport (they did some work on the duo), I was very impressed by how the seat conformed to my back. They are extremely lighter than the stock seats, not to mention they look absolutely stunning.

Tecnocraft also has an in-house Lamborghini Gallardo project car that between all of the carbon fiber parts they’ve developed, shaves off hundreds of pounds. Reducing the car by this much weight offers some major benefits to all aspects of the car, such as speed, handling, longetivity, etc. The Gallardo is known for having a clutch that only lasts about 10,000 miles, the clutch was replaced at 15,000 miles on this car with just minor wear. This is believed to have a direct correlation to the weight reduction. Among the carbon fiber parts, some of the really neat stuff includes the seat replacement, the entire floor panel was re-done in a carbon fiber/kevlar, and the front hood compartment was also re-done in carbon.

While visiting the composites facility, we were shown a first prototype of carbon fiber rear seat replacements for the new Nissan GT-R. Not only did the replacements look amazing, and offer more room to rear passengers, but they were also insanely light. Take a look at this picture of the seat being held up by just one pinky.

Here’s a picture of the seat installed in the car, keep in mind this was just the first prototype:

The GT-R is another in-house project of theirs, so expect many more parts to be available (we saw a bunch of other stuff that’s not yet ready to be shown).

As mentioned earlier, we stopped at BBI Autosport, where we came across some more carbon fiber goodness. Look for a post on that visit soon, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed for the latest updates.