There was a similar fiber available in cloth from a British source, I think it was called Dynel or something similar. The home built boat community liked it for the final layer on the bottom of the boat. It was so abrasion resistant that you could beach the boats with very little wear. This would probably be good on the skid area of slopers......
Dynel was something else, a form of Dacron if I remember correctly. It was also a bad idea for primary structure in composite construction, but for an entirely different reason.
The basic idea in a fiber composite is to have some strong, stiff fibers to carry the loads, and some sort of matrix material to hold the fibers in position. The key is that the fibers must be much stiffer than the matrix material or else the matrix does all the work and the fibers are along for the ride.
For example, consider concrete reinforced with steel rods. The concrete holds the rods in position, but the much stiffer steel rods do most of the work of carrying the loads.
Now imagine concrete reinforced with rubber rods. Perhaps the rubber rods are indeed capable of carrying quite a bit of load, but by the time you stretch them far enough to start carrying that load, the concrete has long since cracked and crumbled away. The matrix tried to do all the work, the fibers didn't do their job, and the matrix (and therefore the structure) failed.
This was the problem with Dynel. It's less stiff than epoxy, so the epoxy tries to do all the work. It would actually be stronger to use just epoxy by itself, at least you'd have a greater amount of epoxy in the same total volume. I remember a seminar by Burt Rutan I attended years ago. Someone asked him his opinion of the Dynel/epoxy used in the KR-2 homebuilt (which fortunately just used the composite for the outer shell for shape, but used wood for the primary load-bearing structure). His comment was that "The Dynel is a great way to hold the epoxy in place while it cures."
Don Stackhouse @ DJ Aerotech [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.djaerotech.com
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