To meet growing market demand, Rock West Composites is now selling an Economy line of tubes and plates. These products provide a lower bar for entry for customers looking to incorporate carbon fiber and other composites into their projects. This low-cost line is sourced internationally and is best utilized in applications that do not have engineering critical features, but has the convenience of shipping from our Utah operation for expedient delivery.
Our premium Rock West tubes and plates are manufactured to our exacting standards in-house. The result is greater strength and stiffness with guaranteed consistent layups, tolerances, and test results. If you need help deciding what is right for you, please contact us and we’ll assist you as best we can.
Unlike metals which have similar properties in all directions (isotropic), the properties of composites are varying, dependent on the orientation of the fibers in each layer.
Roll wrapped tubing is manufactured using multiple layers of pre-preg carbon fiber (and if noted, other) materials. In general each layer is about 0.006 inches thick which means that a tube with a wall thickness of 0.060 inches will typically be composed of 9-10 individual layers of carbon fiber. The number of layers(plys) allows us to vary the orientation of the fibers throughout the thickness, creating a high performance, engineered product.
- Fabric Tubing has an outer ply of woven material (denoted below as 0°/90°). Typically this outer ply is a 2x2 twill weave (diagonal appearance seen below) but it can also be a plain weave (small checkerboard), spread tow (large format plain weave / checkerboard) or other off-axis weave such as a braid. The core of these tubes are almost always comprised of multi-directional "uni" plies.
- Uni Tubing is comprised of multi-directional "uni" plies just like the fabric tubes however instead of the outer ply being fabric, it is unidirectional and most typically oriented at 0° (fibers running the length).
- To learn about our Roll Wrapping Process click here.

*This diagram illustrates a "generic" layup. The SKU being viewed may not have the layup schedule shown in this diagram. To view this SKU's particular layup please check out the "LAYUP ORIENTATION" tab.