5mm 400g 3k Lightweight Braided Carbon Fibre Sleeve

When infused against a mould surface, the mould facing surface will take on the finish of the mould itself, i.e. if the mould is smooth and glossy, so will the finished part.

We use the same measurement that the manufacturers use when measuring the braid, that is with the fibre orientation at 45 degrees, which should be half way between 'fully stretched' and fully contracted; it is quite fluid though (as you'll now have seen) and so it can easily appear shorted or longer than expected depending on how much it's opened up.

Just stretch it, that will reduce the diameter of the sleeve.

We actually list the thickness on the 'specification tab'; if you look under Thickness at 50% FV mm you'll see that the nominal thickness of the material.

This is just the dry fabric. To make use of the sleeve you would need to combine it with a suitable resin, like our EL2 Epoxy Laminating Resin, which would then cure to make the finished product.

For wet-lay lamination you will use approximately the same weight of resin as the weight of the fabric. For example, with a 200gsm cloth, for 1 square metre you will have 200g of fabric and thus will need 200g of resin to wet it out, plus a small amount of wastage for the brush and mixing pot.

Thickness of any reinforcement is dependent on consoldation (how much it's 'squashed down'. For this reason we generally give out thickness figures for when the reiforcement is consoldated under vacuum (1bar); this seems like the most useful figure. For example, a 90gsm carbon, a single layer, compressed under vacuum, would be about 0.1mm thick. For a 200gsm carbon a single layer would be about 0.25mm thick. This is the number you see listed under 'thickness' in the specification table.

You can purchase a sample of our fabrics here.

Well, this depends entirely on what reinforcement you're laminating, speficically how thick and heavy it is. If you're laminating 5mm of carbon fibre you'll use a lot more resin that if you're laminating just 1mm of it. Fortunately though there a really quick rule to get a good estimate - simply add up the total weight of your reinforcement and you'll probably need the same weight in resin. This means that if you're laminating 5 layers of 200g carbon (so a total of 1000g of carbon) then you'll want about 1000g (i.e. 1kg) of Epoxy Resin. If it was 2 layers of 450g glass then you'd need about 900g per square metre.

The carbon fabric itself will survive many hundreds of degrees and is not the limiting factor for almost all applications. The limiting factor will be the heat distortion temperature of the resin system you plan to laminate this fabric with.

An engine rocker/cam cover may easily be exposed to hot oils at around 120°C as well as heat from the exhaust which would be dependent on the engine configuration and level of tune. As such we would recommend considering using a higher temperature resin system such as our Very High Temperature Epoxy Laminating Resin which, with an appropriate post-cure, can be used up to 180°C.

An alternative option would be to consider making the part with an out of autoclave pre-preg carbon fibre where typically the resin systems can achieve a HDT up to 120°C.

For very critical applications, such as aerospace, even dry carbon fabrics will be 'lifed' due to very gradual degradation of the sizing on the fibres, however in practice, for most applications, the degradation is minimal and most users would consider dry fabrics to not have a shelf life when stored appropriately.

All Carbon fibres are naturally charcoal black in colour.