# Carbon fibre Surefire?



## Surefire_for_all (May 26, 2006)

I'm just thinking about HAIII and how hard it actually is. I'm not an expert, but do you think they can make SF lights out of carbon fibre? Well, the cost could be huge, but considering all the properties of carbon fibre, why not? It's light, very hard, corrosion-resistant, water-proof, and many more, just name it!

So, instead of making stupid things out of carbon fibre like carbon-fibre toilet seat, carbon-fibre umbrella, carbon-fibre bike pumps, they can just make one extremely usefull carbon-fibre Surefire product for all to enjoy.

What do you think? :naughty: 

Note: one more thing, have you heard about carbon nanotubes? They are, well, extremely light, for God sake!, and hell, even stronger than steel, say, 100 times, 200 times stronger!! But with current cost about $10,000 an ounce, they won't be touch for may be another 10 years.

If you ask, I love materials and fascinated by them.


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## Protaeus (May 26, 2006)

hehehe,
nanotubes are the answer to everything! apart from the hole in the wallet...

Carbon fibre has its uses, but I doubt that torches is it. First of all its expensive, secondly, its not very abrasion resistant and it has a higher tendency to crack. 
Carbon fibre also tends to shear more easily than metals.

Finally, its not particularly heat conductive and you would then have to make conductive tabs to relay the electricity, allowing for more chance for problems to occur. 

Surefire would also have to invest in $$$ of machinery in order to produce carbon fibre torches.

Also, a good torch needs some weight! I just cant handle a light, plastic, slippery feeling torch, even if it is carbon fibre!

mmmm, the joys of material science 

oh, btw, welcome to cpf forums!


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## McGizmo (May 26, 2006)

I played with carbon fiber and carbon/ kevlar hybrid on a couple battery tubes. There are some companies who are doing some amazing things with 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional weaves of carbon. Atomic6 showed us some space parts of carbon that were really cool! 

Carbon can be a super conductor of both electricity as well as heat. I suspect that at some point, someone will come up with a molded material that is carbon re inforced and a clever substitute for metal parts; possibly in high end flashlights. Some day, I would like to do a hybrid that uses both carbon and titanium. I would use the carbon for its weight but more important, for its thermal capacity. I would like a carbon heat sink coupled with the ti as there would be little galvanic potential between the two rather noble materials.  Justified? Hardly! :nana:


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## bfg9000 (May 26, 2006)

"Carbon fiber" is plastic. Yes, it's carbon-fiber reinforced plastic, but still plastic just like fiberglass-reinforced plastic is. It is extremely resistant to compression but not so good with bending or abrasion, as you'd expect from plastic. And once you chip it, there is the issue with all those fuzzy threads to drive you mad.

Most of the silly "carbon fiber" products you see can more properly be termed "plastic coated" because they serve only an aesthetic function, not a structural one.


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## cy (May 26, 2006)

do these carbon tubes pictured have a base of aluminum? 



McGizmo said:


>


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## a99raptors (May 26, 2006)

Umm..... Nitrolon?


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## slick228 (May 26, 2006)

Welcome to CPF Surefire for all! 

Don,

Since I’m a SureFire enthusiast, the only thing that caught my attention was the contemporary looking KL3 bezel. Can you provide us with more details in a new thread? I don’t want to hijack Surefire for all’s thread. 

Thanks!


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## wquiles (May 26, 2006)

McGizmo said:


>


Those are very neat looking Don 

Will


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## McGizmo (May 26, 2006)

That KL3 was a prototype head PK gave me and I ended up giving him the completed frankenstein light. Beyond that my memory fails.


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## tvodrd (May 26, 2006)

Carbon fiber composites are thermally kind of funny. Carbon fiber has excellent thermal conductivity along its axis, but crap for side-to-side in a unidirectional layup. The epoxy matrix rules. Carbon fiber is also kind of unique in that it can be produced with a slightly negative coefficient of thermal expansion. This makes possible effectively zero cte structures with careful design. (Think pri/secondary mirror mounting in the Hubbel ST.)

Structures and aerospace components take advantage of being able to optimize fiber orientation through weaving and filiment winding processes to take advantage of the fiber's modulus and strength. Structures frequently combine Kevlar/Aramid fibers to increase fracture toughness/damage tolerance.

A lot of it seems to be making it into bling lately.  

My father was a pioneer in the Advanced Composites field and often told of a "secret" program they had once at a place he worked. It was called YSBSS- Your's Should Be So Stiff. 

Larry


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## CLHC (May 27, 2006)

Greetings *Surefire_for_all*—

Very Interesting CF SF bodies. :huh:


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## jar3ds (May 27, 2006)

yeah.... my experience with CF is with Stainless Steel AR15 barrels... a company that i know VERY well raps CF around a SS barrel for added cooling...

however if not careful CF can become an insolator.... i haven't made a strong stance either way if I like the idea of CF and how functional it is... some say CF on SS has 300% better transfer rate to the air... however in practical usage i find no differnce...


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## Chronos (May 27, 2006)

I think that for the bling factor it would be interesting to see a cf light, even if it is wrapped. I've been asking for a cf PDA case for years and years now.


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## FirstDsent (Jun 4, 2006)

I have very limited quantities of .800" thick PMR15 (Polyimide Matrix Reinforced 15-molecular weight) graphite. It is compression molded woven graphite fiber super-aerospace stuff. It was made to machine fixtures and tube clamps out of for Titan rockets. It is one of the strongest engineered composites ever made. It is cured in a press at over 600,000 lbs and over 500 degrees for almost 36 hours. It is then is post-cured at several hundred degrees for over 12 hours. It is super dense, super strong, super high-heat, and super expensive. Each plate approx. 24" square sold for thousands of dollars. a thin test sheet of it rings like a bell if you hold it right and tap it. It looks like really thick conventional woven carbon fiber sheet, but with a slightly brownish tint, and super dense cross-sectional layering. It is in strips about .800 sqare X about 12" long. I think I have two of them. 

I also have a small quantity of compression molded polyimide matrix random oriented long-fiber graphite plate approx .700" thick. This was used for tube clamps and pivot blocks for the General Electric GE90 turbofan engine. Really dense, really strong, really expensive. This stuff looks like matte black demascus steel! really swirly, really cool! It is in plates about 5" X 8". I think I have two of them too. 

I just moved, and will have to dig them out and measure them. 
I would be interested to hear proposals for applications. It's not doing me any good in a box!

Bernie


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## CM (Jun 4, 2006)

Protaeus said:


> hehehe,
> ...Finally, its not particularly heat conductive ...



A company ( http://home.alltel.net/mdegerness/ ) makes rifle barrels wrapped in carbon fiber and they are extremely heat conductive. Conventional military barrels only last 10k rounds before throat erosion sets in when used in adverse conditions whereas this particular carbon fiber wrapped barrel has seen well over 30k rounds with no loss in accuracy. University of Nebraska in Lincoln has done tests with these and I can pull up the data. However, the point is that carbon fiber can be made to be an extremely good conductor of heat.


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## carrot (Jun 4, 2006)

I was under the impression that carbon fiber, while stronger for its weight than aluminum and steel, is also more brittle and of course, as others have mentioned, less abrasion-resistant. Is this not the case with current technology?


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## FirstDsent (Jun 4, 2006)

carrot said:


> I was under the impression that carbon fiber, while stronger for its weight than aluminum and steel, is also more brittle and of course, as others have mentioned, less abrasion-resistant. Is this not the case with current technology?


If by "brittle" you mean subject to impact damage, that is true. However it may take a behemoth impact to rupture it. Composite parts are designed to withstand a predictable load/strain pattern. A flashlight battery tube just isn't going to see much of a load in even heavy duty. In the case of a carbon fiber/epoxy battery tube, what impact is it likely to take? Dropping it from any realistic height won't break it. Hoop strength is another consideration. If it gets run over by a car tire, it may compress radially, and crush. But if there are batteries in it, they will reinforce the battery tube and prevent it from rupturing. It has "memory", and it will probably spring back to round instantly. An aluminum or steel tube won't. The materials in my post have such a high modulus, they are brittle in that if you subject them to a breaking load they will rupture violently instead of bending. However it would take many, many times more load to rupture it than it would steel. 

Abrasion resistance is another thing. I have used carbon fiber/epoxy shafts on my whitewater kayak paddles for years. I have never broken one. However, if I get a deep scratch in the shaft, it can tear some of the reinforcing fibrers, and cause a stress raiser. Repeated strain on the shaft can cause a rupture at the scratch. It is much easier to cause that kind of damage to a composite product than to metal. 

The problem I see with a carbon fiber flashlight is that traditional isostatic and hand-lay up methods aren't going to work well for parts that have to be screwed together. You can't easily thread a carbon tube unless it is built-up thick where the threads are cut. That will make a pretty awkward light. Of course you could machine aluminum threaded inserts, and bond them to the tube, but that defeats the purpose of making a composite light. You would have to design a light from scratch and throw away everything you know about metal construction. A fishing rod doesn't thread together, but it is a very reliable joint. Composites are very different animals. 

You could use a blank of my polyimide/carbon plate though. You can machine it just like billet aluminum. That would be really cool! Imagine an AAA flashlight made of this stuff? Super exotic! The problem is, you can't make the stuff without a 300 ton oil-heated press, a process oven, and a $10,000 mold. 

Bernie
flashlight construction is not


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## twl (Jun 28, 2006)

Stay tuned on this subject.

You may be very interested to see what might be happening with specialty carbon fibers in the field of flashlights.

That's all I can really say right now, but efforts are being made to make something like this happen. And it's not just for decoration purposes.


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## Handlobraesing (Jun 28, 2006)

carrot said:


> I was under the impression that carbon fiber, while stronger for its weight than aluminum and steel, is also more brittle and of course, as others have mentioned, less abrasion-resistant. Is this not the case with current technology?



Wood is stronger than steel for weight.
http://www.popularwoodworking.com/features/fea.asp?id=1043

The biggest hurdle for weight is the batteries though.


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## dizzy (Jun 29, 2006)

twl said:


> Stay tuned on this subject.
> 
> You may be very interested to see what might be happening with specialty carbon fibers in the field of flashlights.
> 
> That's all I can really say right now, but efforts are being made to make something like this happen. And it's not just for decoration purposes.



Ok, now you have sparked my interest. How much is this going to cost me? :lolsign:


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## CM (Jun 29, 2006)

This is how it looks on an AR15 barrel:







I hope to see this used on a flashlight someday.


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## FirstDsent (Jun 30, 2006)

CM said:


> This is how it looks on an AR15 barrel:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I hope to see this used on a terrorist someday!

Schweeeet AR dude! 

Bernie


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## Surefire_for_all (Jul 14, 2006)

Hello again,
I was too busy to log on, sorry.

Wow, thanks, you guys really gave me some excellent insight about the subject. 

The idea of a carbon fibre flashlight came to me when I see the Sony Vaio SZ series with carbon fibre composite and multilayer carbon fibre case, I thought it could be nice to carry a light flashlight when weight is really your focus. So soldiers, campers and many others could be benefited from it. May be. 

Well, I agree about the fact that carbon fibre alone is not so good, nor carbon fibre composite. However, if we use conventional alluminium for the head and carbon fibre (/composite) for the base of the flashlight the same way Surefire has done with their weapon lights, then I think it's ok. Hmm, how did they deal with heat problem in the G2s?

Since carbon fibre composite is made out of carbon fibre and resin, in theory I think we can make multicolor flashlights by just adding colour pigments (not that I want to volunteer for colourful flashlights, but I know some people like them, uh, kids?) without problems of chipped paint. 

Hm, I'm out of idea. Over to you.


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## FirstDsent (Jul 14, 2006)

Tinting reisn in a carbon layup is like tinting black paint. You'll end up with buish black, reddish black, greenish black, etc. I have seen kayak helmets done like this and I don't like it. If you put so much pigment into the resin that it is completely opaque, not only will you compromise the resin's mechanical properties, but it will look disgusting with the carbon showing through in random patterns and densities. I have a prototype kayak paddel shaft that has a resin rich area. The resin is whitish, and the result is ugly. My digital camera is out of town, or I'd post a picture.

Other possibilities are interweaving the carbon/graphite with other materials like kevlar or glass. One of McGizmo's pictures shows a carbon/kevlar fabric. If you use glass instead of the kevlar, then the tinted resin shows up brightly over the glass parts. 

Finally, if you are using a wet lay-up technique (as opposed to prepreg), you can place a vail of any color or pattern over the carbon. This looks great, but completely obscures the carbon. You can even use any lightweight 100% polyester fabric as a vail. I made a fiberglass squirt kayak with a layer of purple/white polka dot fabric on it. Again, no picture available now. If this thread stays alive, I'll post the pics.

Bernie


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