Composites Classroom
Latest news from the Labs:
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Rock West Composites supports student teams in universities around the country and around the world. We were happy to provide assistance to the Warwick Moto team from the University of Warwick by helping them with with information on carbon development and assembly for the build of their unique 1.3kg subframe. Warwick Moto is a student-led university project building a highly innovative electric superbike, ‘Aurora’, a motorcycle designed around a superbike chassis known for its excellent handling. The interdisciplinary team is made up of 25 students and academics, with superbike racer Tom Weeden as their rider; they are innovating some impressive state-of-the-art electrical systems to be integrated within it. For instance, they are using an immersion cooled battery pack and a carbon fiber subframe design supported by Rock West Composites. Although racing is a primary target, the team aims to upskill young engineers and expose them to real world engineering. Warwick Moto does Read more...
As a leading provider of composite materials in Salt Lake City, we frequently sell products to home fabricators. This includes glass and carbon fiber fabrics, tubes, plates, epoxy resins, and even adhesives. Working with any of these materials does pose some amount of risk to human health. As such, we recommend our home fabricating customers be smart about using personal protective equipment (PPE). The pros use appropriate PPE whenever working with carbon or glass fiber. We use PPE at all of our facilities. If you are a home fabricator, you should too. Do not take any chances with your health
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We are extremely proud at Rock West Composites to carry a complete selection of carbon fiber tubing. Our inventory of tubing products continues to grow as well. Among them is unidirectional carbon fiber tubing, the most popular form of tubing we sell. We consider unidirectional tubing the workhorse of our tubing inventory. Unidirectional tubing is so named due to the alignment of the carbon fibers. This post will explain this, and more. Suffice it to say that unidirectional tubing is suitable for a wide range of applications – whether straight up or finished with an outer layer of woven
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Imagine you are a manufacturer. Choose any product, it doesn't really matter. Imagine your customers wishing you made a carbon fiber model. You don't because you know it would cost too much. Well, we may have a solution for you. That solution is carbon fiber veneers. Rock West Composites specializes in all things carbon fiber. We carry raw materials for DIY and commercial fabrication. We carry finished carbon fiber tubes, prepregs, laminates, and sandwich panels. We even offer prototyping and small-run manufacturing. We say all that to say that veneers are just one small part of the Rock West
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There are numerous ways to fabricate composite parts utilizing carbon fiber and glass fiber. One method is the manual layup, a method that sometimes relies on vacuum bagging to help the materials consolidate more uniformly. Vacuum bagging is a procedure that is utilized both commercially and by DIY fabricators. We have written this post to introduce our readers to the concept of vacuum bagging, what it does, and how it works. Note that we sell vacuum bagging kits and supplies. In fact, we have everything you need to complete manual layups at home or in your professional shop. The Point of
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Despite carbon fiber being commercially available for decades, we find that there are plenty of opportunities to sell carbon fiber materials to new customers. These are folks who have never used carbon fiber before. They are just getting started as DIY fabricators or commercial operators looking for alternatives to other materials. At any rate, carbon fiber brings a lot to the table. Designed properly, it can be stronger and lighter than aluminum, steel, titanium and even wood. For some applications, there simply is no better composite. Yet choosing to use carbon fiber for the first time
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