240g Plain Weave Carbon Fibre Tape

Yes, it’s quite a loose form and can be rolled laterally as well as curved and shaped longitudinally. However, because of its relatively loose form you would need to be careful not to break up the tape, causing the fibres to separate.

Our Spread-Tow Ribbon is not designed to be used as a clothing heating element. It’s true that passing an electrical current through any carbon fibre material will cause it to heat up but this is a long way from being a safe heating element for clothes.

No, this carbon fibre tape is not self adhesive; it's simply a dry woven carbon fibre tape. To bond it to EPP foam you would need to use a laminating resin like our EL2 Epoxy Laminating Resin.

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.

Yes, it’s quite a loose form and can be rolled laterally as well as curved and shaped longitudinally. However, because of its relatively loose form you would need to be careful not to break up the tape, causing the fibres to separate.

Our Spread-Tow Ribbon is not designed to be used as a clothing heating element. It’s true that passing an electrical current through any carbon fibre material will cause it to heat up but this is a long way from being a safe heating element for clothes.

No, this carbon fibre tape is not self adhesive; it's simply a dry woven carbon fibre tape. To bond it to EPP foam you would need to use a laminating resin like our EL2 Epoxy Laminating Resin.

Yes, carbon fibre is a very high resistance conductor along the length of the fibres.

How suitable this carbon fibre tape would be would rather depend on the actual scale of the plastic wishbones and the direction and manner in which they need reinforcing. The tape is either 25mm or 50mm wide and the fabric it's made from is around 0.3mm thick, if we're talking about wishbones on a 1:12 scale car for example then I would think that this tape would be too bulky to wrap around very small plastic wishbones. However, if we're talking 1:5 scale or bigger then it might be more appropriate.

The other thing to bear in mind is the direction of the load and so the direction (orientation) that you need to be reinforcing the wishbones in. Most typically, the majority of force acting on a wishbone would be longitudinally down its length, meaning that you would want to add as much reinforcement as possible down the length (to stop it flexing or breaking), you don't really need or want to add any reinforcement in the 'hoop' direction (around the circumference of the tube profile). This means that unidirectional carbon fibre tape, aligned with the fibres running down the wishbone length, would be more appropriate.

As for a recommended epoxy, I would suggest our EL2 epoxy laminating resin. Depending on the type of plastic the wishbones are made from, you might need to experiment with some different types of surface prep; for ABS flame treating (just going over with a blowtorch) will allow epoxy to bond to it.