Hi Everyone,

21 page tutorial guide with lots of detailed photographs throughout explaining the complete process from start to finish for simple out-of-autoclave prepreg carbon fibre. Available to download completely free using the link below.

This guide will accompany our new Prepreg Carbon Fibre Starter Kit and will of course be followed up with a video tutorial in the not too distant future.

Please provide any feedback on this tutorial here. If anything is unclear of could be explained better (or you spot any mistakes) then please let me know; I can use your input to improve the guide for everyone and ensure that the video tutorial is spot-on.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and particularly to seeing your results if you follow this guide yourself.

Best regards, Matt

Matt Statham
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Sales

A good read  

Very good comprehensive guide.

One suggestion, to make things easy for the novices, would be to explain in one sentance what each material does as you introduce each stage of the process.  Most of it is covered or self explanatory but one that stood out is the breather cloth. Its obvious once you get down to the vacuuming part of the guide that it facilitates air flow. however those new to composites or with only wet lay experience might be wondering what its for until that point.

When i open the pdf file,i return to the home page of the forum...why????

Hi Folks,

Thanks for the feedback.

One suggestion, to make things easy for the novices, would be to explain in one sentance what each material does as you introduce each stage of the process.  Most of it is covered or self explanatory but one that stood out is the breather cloth. Its obvious once you get down to the vacuuming part of the guide that it facilitates air flow. however those new to composites or with only wet lay experience might be wondering what its for until that point.

I'll have a look into this. I was planning on putting a 'glossary of terms' in but they always go at the back and I'm not sure whether anyone ever reads them so I didn't bother. I'll go through the guide and see if I could add in a sort of 'what's it for' introduction to each part of the process; this would seem like a good idea; when you use these materials every day it's easy to forget that people won't necessarilly know what certain things are for!

I think your pre-preg lecture video would be integrated with custommade curing oven system explanation(type of heating device, air circulation, vacum hose vent) according to the priority of customer need is How to subtitute autoclave on this process. Or maybe you/EC will be able to provide the parts for customade oven, then it would be the advantage for beginer to void expensive trial n errors, heat device n thermostat control will be crucial I thought.

Ovens are a complicated subject; in fact they're the reason why we've waited this long to do a guide to prepreg but really this guide is intended to show that for small parts (which are the ones that lots of people struggle with because they can be impractical or difficult to infuse) you can simply use a completely standard domestic oven which you could buy second-hand off ebay for not much money at all. The thermostat control on a reasonably modern (less than 10 year old) oven will be plenty accurate enough and it's a very simple job to drill a hole through the side to pass the vacuum hose through.

To cure larger parts you would need a larger oven of course but I don't think we'll be rushing into making a guide explaining how to biuld an oven. It's actually quite complicated and we really do need to consider safety; the idea of people badly constructing an oven after loosely following our advice is not something that we want to get into. We may well design and sell a flat-pack industrial oven but first we'll need to design something that can be produced for the kind of money that people can afford. Industrial ovens start at several thousand pounds and so would be unrealistic for most people. We would like to think that something could be done for £1000-£1500 but that's that's just an aspiration, we've not done any designs/calculations to see if that's possible yet. For now, we list the type of ready made ovens you could source (domestic oven, catering oven, powder-coating oven etc. etc.) and would suggest that you run with one of those to see how amazing prepreg carbon fibre can be.

--Matt

Matt Statham
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Sales

Hello Matt
Just read your piece on prepreg. Awesome, crystal clear instruction. Well done.
Just one thing to add. When you make your video, PLEASE show your method of using honeycomb core with prepreg also.
I know how much effort goes into a video production, (I am also a video producer) it would be a shame to leave honeycomb out.
Thanks
Fred

Hi Fred,

Hi Matt
Your probably right. Honey comb is a lot more advanced but I am glad you are planning it.
For those who are a bit more serious about having an Autoclave I have included some pictures of an Autoclave I have constructed for about $600.00. dollars.
I tracked down an industrial sized paint pressure pot. This one is about 30 years and is rated for 650 f temperature at 120 PSI. I had thought of making one out of pipe line pipe but quickly learned that I would probably kill or destroy my shop if it blew up. My composite supplier knew of two instances where this had happened so I decided on a certified pressure vessel. After some reading I quickly learned how dangerous compressed air chambers are.
So I found this 60 gallon tank in the USA and with shipping I got it home for about $600. (there are also 30 gallon tanks used in industry)
As you can see I mounted it on its side and made a a swing open arrangement. (The door weighs 90 pounds)
There are numerous ports to attach regulators and vacuum lines to. A bit of paint and it looks pretty good. I did price a brand new 60 gallon tank from BINKS which came to about $6000.00 dollars, way out of my range.
I then got a house hold oven and removed the eliment and heat control. I installed this inside the tank under a sheet metal tray. (not shown in pictures)
I got the tank up to 450 f which is plenty for prepreg, or cooking a turkey. The temperature and pressure is all adjustable to suit what I will be doing in the future.
I hope to connect a computer to the heating control so I can stage the times and ramp the temperatures as called for.
I am sure there are a lot of surplus tanks out there that can be found if this is really what you want to get into.
Hope this helps.
Fred


  

to be fair, as Matt says, most the smallish parts pre-preg is ideal for can be done in a kitchen oven.  Some even have a big enough and flexible seal that you could cut a hole for the silicone vacuum hose too, then just put on another seal on when the missus wants to cook dinner!!

certainly doable at home without buying second ovens or expensive custom composites ovens.