The style 3350 carbon/s-glass that I use in my vac bagging video comes from CARBCOM. CARBCOM is the only supplier of this style of carbon in the 3.5oz weight that I have ever found. They have the stuff woven for them to their specifications.
The difficulty is that we in the model airplane business are bottom feeders that live off of the leftovers from the much larger users of these materials. Nobody fires up a loom to make a run of carbon fabric for little guys like us. Fortunately CARBCOM has customers that make things like sailboards, etc. This provides enough demand for the 3350 style carbon/s-glass so that CARBCOM still does runs of that style of fabric on occasion. The other thing that affects carbon fabric availability and price is the supply of the carbon tow that the fabric is woven from. When carbon tow is plentiful and cheap then CARBCOM buys a bunch of it and weaves a big batch of fabric and the price of our fabrics is cheap. At other times, the aerospace or other industries have an unusually high demand for carbon tow which outstrips the ability of the carbon tow manufacturers to produce. At these times carbon fabrics become rare and expensive. We are now in one of those "rare and expensive" times. I recently contacted CARBCOM and was told that carbon tow is unavailable at this time and that CARBCOM would be using all of their remaining 3K tow to weave other styles of carbon fabric. I was able to negotiate a deal with CARBCOM to buy all of their remaining style 3350 carbon/s-glass (about 600 yards). They did not envision making this style of carbon again for at least six months though they don't have any way to reliably predict the availability of carbon tow either. I will be saving some of this 3350 fabric for my own use but will offer about half of it for sale to others. The price I paid for the fabric was only a little higher than the price I paid last year when carbon was plentiful and cheap. The deal I made with CARBCOM was to buy all of their remaining stock, including all of their partial rolls. In return for that they offered me the five roll price from last year's price list rather charging the new higher prices. I will make another posting with details of the deal that I am offering to those who would like some of this style 3350 carbon/s-glass. RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
