Carbon fibre with the resin already in it, cut to shape and laid by hand to the ply book.
The resin is measured before it arrives.The plies are laid by hand, here.
Prepreg is the material behind most high-performance carbon parts. The fibre comes already impregnated with a measured amount of resin, so the ratio is fixed before it reaches us, rather than depending on how much resin is brushed on by hand.
It needs heat to cure, so it is laid up here and cured in the same building, in the autoclave or one of the two ovens.
How it is curedLay-up is manual work, and most of the quality of a finished part is decided here.
Prepreg begins to cure slowly at room temperature, so it is kept frozen until it is needed. It has to come up to room temperature before the pack is opened, otherwise moisture condenses on the material.
Each layer is cut to its pattern, with the fibres running in the direction the design calls for. A ply laid at the wrong angle looks identical and behaves very differently.
The ply book sets the order and orientation of every layer. Plies are laid by hand in the cleanroom, because anything trapped between two plies stays in the part.
As the lay-up builds, stacks of plies are compacted under vacuum to pull out air trapped between layers. The finished lay-up is sealed in a vacuum bag, ready for cure.
Wet lay-up still has its place. For a part that has to be light, stiff and repeatable, prepreg is the better material.
Material storage, lay-up and cure sit under one roof, so a lay-up goes from the cleanroom to cure without leaving the site.
Wherever a part has to be light and stiff at the same time.
About prepreg lay-up specifically. The general ones are answered on the homepage.
It depends on the part. Tell us what it has to do, and any material your specification calls for, and we will confirm what we would use.
Anything that settles on a ply ends up inside the laminate, where it can weaken the bond between layers. Our cleanroom is temperature controlled, which also keeps the material handling the same way through the day.
Yes. If your engineering team has already specified the laminate, we lay it to your ply book.
A drawing, a photograph, or just a description. Whatever you have is enough to get a price, and we reply to most enquiries the same working day.