Carbon Fiber a Father’s Day story

Carbinfinity was born from a singular project that Real Carbon was asked to quote on. A ring manufacturing company was having issues with their supply of this “forged” rod stock. Something I had never really heard of before. Mind you, this was 2018 and I had only been in the industry for about a year at that time. I did some professional googling and found some articles about Callaway and Lamborghini trademarking the process and name “forged carbon fiber”. Initially I was a bit hesitant to even try this project as I was concerned, we would get sued. Mike assured me that it was ok to proceed. From my professional googling I had a good starting point to work from. There were industrial supplies of the material we would need to mold this product, but we had a ton of scrap material that I could experiment with before we got to that. My first step was to process some sheets of uni down using a paper shredder. Shockingly, this worked! I just used our office paper shredder and operated it much like I was shredding paper. After several hours of doing this, I had enough material to pack a small sample mold we had machined earlier that day. The part came out of the oven and the customer loved it! Uh oh… it took me hours to make a 1″ tall by .25″ diameter sample. So, we reached out and got an industrial supply of the material which was all virgin by nature. The virgin material didn’t have the same look and aesthetic that I had come up with in house, and after some other issues we went back to the drawing board on this whole paper shredder business. Unfortunately, we ended up losing the ring rod stock business. But what I failed to realize at the time was that something special was brewing inside my hectic mind.

Mike (my father) was born in Scotland. From an American standpoint, recycling is a new concept. From the Scottish perspective, recycling was self-evident and a part of the culture. Farming and agricultural work begat a network of repurposing, re-using, and recycling. He would tell stories of the milk man coming by, then the next day the milk bottle man to collect your used jugs. Men with green, brown, and blue bins would ride by collecting table scraps to go out to the chickens, or various other forms of waste material to be later repurposed. This sounds like a story from the turn of the century (the 20th that is) but these all take place in the 60’s and 70’s.

In the grand scheme of things, Scotland is a much smaller economy as well. As compared to America, things like napkins and straws just were not available simply from a cost standpoint. Businesses could not afford to provide such things for free. Leaving lights on, or the tap, were cardinal sins for my father growing up. He grew up in a world where energy was not free, nor were simple things like napkins and extra packets of sauce. This cultural mindset carried over to our household in America. We were an early adopter of the recycling programs that came to neighborhoods in the 90’s and early 2000’s. It was just an obvious next step to environmentalism. My father never bought a new car that got less gas mileage than his previous. He drove as if his own mother was in the car, no matter what. Coasting up to red lights and accelerating at a snail’s pace were a part of everyday life. I say all this to say, recycling and environmentalism has been a part of my family’s story since before I was born. It is engrained in my father’s very identity, and so a large part of me carries this legacy.

Now back to the issue at hand, recycling carbon fiber waste. Time passed; we lost the forged rod stock business, but we gained an idea in the process. Why not try and use scrap material from our automated ply cutting machine to make recycled carbon fiber products? This material was being thrown away and filling up dumpsters with valuable material. For each kilo of carbon fiber produced, there is an associated 24 kilograms of Co2. We also pay up to $10 per sq. ft for these materials! So, we set about coming up with a process to utilize every last square inch of material we could.

An automated ply cutting machine is essentially like a table router with specialized blades and cutting tools for fabrics and other soft goods like pre-preg carbon fiber. Pre-preg is carbon fiber that has been pre impregnated with resin and rolled into tightly onto cores. You can unroll the sheets and cut out your desired ply layups, we usually opt for 50″ wide rolls or for our uni we use a 1-meter-wide roll. This usually dictates how many of a certain ply variant you can fit. A lot of our uni based parts have really exact ply lengths to make sure there are no excess. For example, we have parts that use qty three 13″ tall plies, so you fill all that Y space up and do not have any off cuts that result in what we call table scraps. For our 50″ rolls, a lot of the ply shapes are less straightforward and so we have to nest them with space, so the drag knife does not pull the material up. This creates a similar effect to when you make sugar cookies and use a punch to cut out your desired shapes, and there is a left-over mesh. For sugar cookies, you can just ball that all up and make more cookies. With carbon fiber, that is not so simple. We normally cut these scrap pieces and let them sit in a bin for weeks or up to about a month to let the resin fully oxidize before we throw them all out in the dumpster out back. This waste adds up and we are just a small shop, colleagues in the space have much larger machines and so potentially much larger table scrap waste. The industry is moving more and more to VARTM (vacuum assisted resin transfer molding) but there are still places that use the same process we do, which results in a lot of waste.

Recycling these scraps has been a long and exhausting process. As you now know we have been at it for about 7 years now. Other projects have occupied my time, but it has finally come to the point where we need another growth vehicle to take our business to the next level. One that scales and, in my own environmentalist way, makes the world a better place.

That’s the genesis of how we made a recycled carbon fiber Aluminum tag, and cnc discovered the #Dad script (& the #7 Dad script which we thought was really funny)