Glass fiber processing

I use lots of Bidirectional and Unidirectional "S" glass in my composites shop.

I can purchase ready to use flox (chopped glass fibers) from most composite supply houses. (I.E. Fiberfrax, US Composites, etc)

However, to make an alternative flox in a hurry, I simply use scissors to cut up some small pieces of leftover glass. I drop them into a hi-speed coffee grinder and turn it on for 20 or 30 seconds.

I doubt that they are uniform in length. In my case it doesn't matter much since I am mixing the flox with epoxy to varying ratios and using the mixture merely to blend load carrying vertices's.

It's crude but it's effective.

how about just buy it from the factory around China or Taiwan or Korea? there is whole sellers around ...if need any check with me..

Commercial 'chopper gun', and adjust the feed right down. It's an air powered tool.

Cheers,

Stu

I concurr with this comment. I've seen commercial chop guns running. They are fed with a reel of glass fibre. The gun chops the fibres into short strands and blows it on to a surface along with the resin.

If all you want is to chop the fibres you may want to review how these guns work.

Check out minifibers.com

I used to buy similar stuff from them and their quality is good.

Hello Guest,

I've worked in a rather large glass manufacturing plant and have had to buy, or develope many size reduction devices pending on length of chop and quantities needed.

So, the question then comes to, how much glass are we talking about? The previous post concerning chopping guns is great for application directly onto the end use but if you want to do this in bulk, say 500kg/hour, then you should be looking at a hammer mill. We used steel with a coat of ultra hard welded (see http://www.brospec.com/) material. Glass is so abrasive that we had all contact parts coated in this stuff.

The hammer mill had screens that would not let anything longer than 2mm out untill it got reduced in size enough to fit out the holes.

Let us know the quantities you need to deal with on a time basis to offer some good solutions.

Sensai