DIY carbon fiber enclosures for electronics?

[Glenn]

Can carbon fiber be used for building small handheld
enclosures for electronics, and what is involved?

Is it easy to work with? Is it readily available?
Can it be easily machined afterwards?

What are the electrical properties of carbon fiber, is it
conductive, and can a 2.4ghz RF transceiver be embedded with
internal antenna or is it RF blocking?

Any pointers would be appreciated.

 

[Ian Stirling]

Can carbon fiber be used for building small handheld
enclosures for electronics, and what is involved?
Yes.

Is it easy to work with? Is it readily available?

Not really, fairly.
http://www.carbonfibre.com/ IIRC is a supplier.

Can it be easily machined afterwards?

Not practically.

What are the electrical properties of carbon fiber, is it
conductive, and can a 2.4ghz RF transceiver be embedded with
internal antenna or is it RF blocking?

It's resistive, it could be a problem.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Google for
"peel ply" carbon
which looks like it'll produce some results.

 

[Richard]

Have you looked at the price of Carbon Fiber? It's pretty darn expensive as
well and not all that easy to work with.

 

[Steve Taylor]

It works like fibre glass, with either polyester or epoxy resins.

Like glass fibre, but better on the skin.
Is it readily available?
Yes, from pretty well the same places as glass fibre

Yes, but its harder than hell and very abrasive: we use diamond tooling.
Yes, of course.
and can a 2.4ghz RF transceiver be embedded with
Don't have that information: my guess is it WILL block RF.

Steve

 

[Roger Hamlett]

Can carbon fiber be used for building small handheld
enclosures for electronics, and what is involved?

Is it easy to work with? Is it readily available?
Can it be easily machined afterwards?

What are the electrical properties of carbon fiber, is it
conductive, and can a 2.4ghz RF transceiver be embedded with
internal antenna or is it RF blocking?

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Plenty of small racing cars, and things like aircraft use this. The cowling
on my own aircraft was 'homemade' using the fibre cloth, and tape.
Basically just like glass fibre to work with, except it wears tooling
rapidly. I bought tungsten carbide bladed cutting shears to cut the matting,
and these still needed resharpening after a relatively short while. The same
applies to drilling and cutting the finished product.
Remember that the resins are usually fairly 'nasty', and likely to cause
various forms of dermatitis, so use barrier cream, followed by gloves, and
also preferably some of the resins that are designed to be 'safer'.
It blocks RF quite reasonably. I'd expect the transceiver to have problems.
If you are building small casings, consider working with ABS (which can be
both bonded and machined, and is transparent to RF) instead.

Best Wishes