how thick is thin

Who has stuck the calipers to modern fiberglass tubing? It looks to me like "thin wall" tends to be 1.6mm or less, while "traditional" or "thick wall" tends to be over 2.0mm in thickness. Obviously that varies with tube diameter and I am only looking at 38-98mm here.

I am not looking for a silver bullet or super precision, but it is nice to have an idea.

I learned the hard way to not sand a CF tube down to finger thickness once. So that’s how thin is too thin imo. Sheared a CF tube in flight once.

I actually measured a bunch of actual Wildman and Madcow tubes 29mm to 98mm for my OpenRocket parts database.

Thin wall is usually about 0.040" (1.0mm) and regular is 0.055" to 0.067" (roughly 1.6mm) for sizes up to around 98mm diameter. Madcow 75mm thinwall - the largest they offer - is spec'd at 0.049" but I haven't verified that one by measurement. The standard tubes get thicker above 98mm, the largest sizes hit 0.095" wall per the manufacturer.

I misread the thread title as "how thick is skin" and clicked the link with great trepidation. I was quite relieved.

Neil, are we secretly one person? I opened the thread, not with trepidation, but with curiosity regarding what if anything skin has to do with rocketry. This is the watering hole, so it could have been about anything.

neil_w said:

I misread the thread title as "how thick is skin"...

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I thought it was going to be another cooking thread. Wait...that seems really creepy now.

I remember when I first got a dial caliper.. measured everything! Hated using a vernier caliper..

Blond hairs are thinner than red, which are thinner than brunets...

And a machinist told me why he has a pack of cigarette / rolling paper at his station: a piece of cigarette paper is 0.001". He places it on his piece, and then uses it to zero his cutting head..

Andrew_ASC said:

I learned the hard way to not sand a CF tube down to finger thickness once. So that’s how thin is too thin imo. Sheared a CF tube in flight once.

Click to expand...

OK I'll bite. What is "finger thickness"?

Oh mybad it was like fingernail thin maybe a millimeter and half, yeah. Us university kids with no experience had this dumb idea to save mass. So we saved many many more millimeters off of thin wall tube. It wasn’t a good ending but we learned stuff.