The Mysterious and exotic Carbon Fiber. What else can we make with it?

CO2 can't be "cracked" by electrolysis because it isn't a polar bond.

And the evidence shows that CO2 increases FOLLOW temperature increases, which even GW proponents admit are very strong feedback loops.


Carbon Fiber is very similar to fiberglass.

Plastic frames can be injection moulded, one after the other. Carbon fibre would be lots of work, and then you'd compromise it by drilling and cutting parts out.

Anyway the problem with carbon fiber is that it needs a resin, and that's how it's a composite. So it's only as good as it's resin, like epoxy's that'll be harder and stiffer and lighter, or vinylesters that'll be heavier but more flexible. And that type of thing is better for curvy pieces. It's not like you can get a 'block of carbon fiber' and whittle it to the shape you want, that would defeat the purpose.

My deceased father used to work for Union Carbide and was in the Carbon Fiber division. Carbon Fiber and it's derivitives, "carbon-carbon" are interesting materials and have been used for a lot of different and interesting applications.
Carbon Fiber, as the name suggests, is a fiber, and can be woven. One interesting "demonstrator" my father had, 25+ years ago, was a golf club with a carbon fiber woven shaft. It looked as though there was a plastic tube and a black woven material inside. You wouldn't want to really play golf with this, 'cause, as I said, it was a demonstrator and made to demonstrate a specific purpose or use. If you grabbed the grip, and the head on the other end, and twisted, the thing was as stiff as you could possibly wish. It didn't "torque" at all. But grab it, and swing it back and forth in a normal golf stance ---- and the thing was like a BIG rubber pencil, wobbling back and forth crazily! The purpose was to show that, depending upon HOW it was woven, you could make it amazingly strong in one mechanical direction or axis, but very elastic in another. This club served no other purpose, since obviously you couldn't play golf with it (though the idea of sneaking it into Tiger Woods golf bag, well .... unfortunatly the thing went missing years ago).
Carbon-carbon is another iteration and can be molded into various forms. It has certain properties like asbestos, and thus can insulate furnaces.
When my father retired from Union Carbide he worked at the european branch of Fiber Materials, Inc. in Scotland. This company did not make Carbon fiber, but shaped it into what the customer desired.
At one point, the then USSR government wanted to purchace a quantity of the material to be used as furnace insulation. A temporary kabosh was put on this by the USA state department (Fiber Materials was an American Company; even the european branch had to obey American law) because carbon fiber could also be used in the nosecones of ICBMs! Well, my father informed the amazingly brilliant paper pushers at state that the USSR could make, and DID make, carbon fiber every bit the quality of ours (if the USSR could make a material inside their country, we could sell them the stuff; if they couldn't, and the material had military purpose, we couldn't sell it to them) and state said, no, the USSR didn't have it. My father said he'd been to expositions and seen Soviet carbon. Finally, a solution to the dumbass impass was provided by, of all organisations, the C.I.A., which confirmed to the state dept the Soviets DID have it; it was simply more economical to buy it from FMI in a pre-made form than make it themselves.
Parts of the wing roots of the AV8A and subsequent models of the Harrier "jump jet" are made out of carbon. My father tried to get the Royal Air Force to buy jet exhaust nozzles made out of it, but unfortunatly, the design of the British jets in the miod 1980's was equivelant to ours from about 1960, and the design wouldn't allow it in that function.
Still, the material has found it's way into some aircraft frames in a variety of craft.
There are other uses which it's good at .... but this can't be as long as "War and Peace."

Yeah, I've done a lot of thinking along those lines. Carbon is pretty neat stuff, and we just happen to be loaded with it. Wouldn't it be something to start plucking carbon atoms out of the air and aranging them into absolutely flawless diamonds? Or remarkably uniform diamond plating? (That'd be sweet on a 1911. . .)

We're probably a ways off from that sort of thing, but it's still fun to poke the ideas around. Once we start ripping molecules into their constituient atoms, what's to say we won't start on the atoms, as well? And I'm not just talking about fission, here. Fission is a parlor trick. I'm talking about stripping off protons and tacking them back on where we want them. Lead into gold, anyone?

Anyway, back to carbon. As I said before, carbon is pretty neat stuff, and it'd be pleanty foolish to think we've seen all it has to offer. It's anyone's guess as to what sort of allytropes we might cook up next, let alone what they might be good for, but my guess is that it'll be nothing short of revolutionary.

I've often thought a makeshift graphite bomb would be good for a laugh. . .

Carbon nanotubes will be the next big material science revolution, but it can't be produced in sufficiently mass quantities, long lengths, high enough purity, and cheaply enough as it stands right now. Eventually we'll find a way to cheaply mass produce it and control the quality, much like the history of aluminum.

It has revolutionary applications in electrical and electronic systems as an incredible conductor, plus atomic-scaled circuits that current silicon dies could only dream about, and have heat wicking abilities exceeding silver. It also has incredible strength properties. Its one of the only materials strong enough to make hypothetical space elevators a reality, and such extreme properties can be applied to every type of consumer good.

How does carbon fiber taste as a hamburger patty? Can't be much worse than McD's, and would likely last a lot longer in storage.

Why would you need to get carbon from CO2? We've got huge, relatively cheap deposits of coal.

HK/Fabarm made the FP6 shotgun with a carbon fiber finish. Looks pretty cool with the heat shield they used.

Carbon fiber does make some fantastic bicycles for exactly the reasons Tommygun mentioned; it can be made to bend in one direction, but resist bending and fatigue along another axis better than a metal can. It's also lighter than titanium, which used to be the cutting edge for high-performance bicylces.

It's also been tried in aircraft wings; IIRC the X-29 had carbon fiber wings that needed to flex somewhat in some ways, but be absolutely inflexible in others.

Since guns don't need to flex too much, I can't see carbon fiber being more useful than polymers in gun construction, but used in composites it might make some fantastic furniture. It might be possible to make good springs out of carbon fiber, but as far as I can tell, metal springs in guns are entirely satisfactory.

Of course we can break CO2 down to carbon and oxygen: we just plant trees.

Seriously though, carbon fibre composites' main claim to fame is stiffness for a given weight of material. It is far better in this department than most other engineering materials, so for example you can have a rifle barrel far stiffer for a given weight than a comparable steel one, or equally stiff but considerably lighter. Similarly with gunstocks: the specific stiffness of wood, aluminium and steel is fairly similar, and all are higher than fibreglass composite, but a carbon fibre composite stock is several times stiffer - more resistant to deflection under load - than any of these. As has been noted, it also can be engineered to give different properties in different directions.

It does have downsides though: it isn't good for elevated temperatures and nor is it much good for resisting wear, and it does require a bit of technology to produce (so is not really within the abilities of the home or small shop), but the cost is coming down all the time.

I'm currently working on a carbon-fiber semiauto .22LR rifle reciever, to be used with AK trigger group parts, Ruger 10/22 magazines, and a few other OTS parts. Dunno how it's gonna work, but by the end of summer I hope it's at least together.

I plan to have several of my organs replaced with new, carbon fiber units, and am also designing a house to be built largely from this material.

carbon composites are much more expensive to produce than say, fiberglass composites.

You can get a guitar thats made out of CF

http://www.compositeacoustics.com/

I would like to see a Carbon Fiber Corvette body too. Much tougher than Fiberglass if not lighter. Hint, Hint, GM! Special Edition?

Click to expand...

Check out the C6 Z06. Many of the panels on the vehicle are already Carbon Fiber, and the ALMS Corvettes have been carbon fiber since the late 90s.

I'd be a little worried about a Kaboom with a carbon fiber gun. Carbon Fiber shards are very sharp. Not saying a carbon fiber gun would explode, just saying I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened.