There has been a lot of use of CF these days compared to yester years. I wanted to do some testing of CF vrs Glass cloth or nothing at all for lightning of foam parts. I cut two 2” x 12” foam blocks for the tests. One block has a ½” wide CF strip the length of the block. The second has the a ½” wide glass cloth x length of block and third has no glass no CF. The three blocks were all sheeted with west systems epoxy and then vacuum bagged.
The test bench is a little crude but good enough to see what the deflection vrs weight would read. The weight was 5lb hung in the center.
These were the readings
Block with glass: weight 6oz. deflection .020”@5lbs
Block with CF: weight 6oz. deflection .005”@5lbs
Block with nothing: weight 5oz. deflection .020” @5lbs
So the block with CF was the overall winner in weight and deflection. In pic7 I had hung a 35lb plate on the cf and it took about 3 minutes before failing. Also note the blocks with cf and glass did not break through as I expected they wouldn’t compare to no cloth.