OK, here's my two cents on composites, professing to know *something* considering I've sent rockets into the ground at mach 2 and had the fins stay on
:
1. Fiberglass: excellent stuff to start with. I still use it almost exclusively. Strong, cheap, and easy to work with. Not too many bad points. You can also finish it without a veil (well, duh, most veils *are* made of fiberglass
). Price is usually $4-10/yard for virgin cloth.
2. Carbon fiber: great cloth, looks cool, very light and STRONG. But it's expensive, and harder to use than glass (you can't see when it's wet out as easily). Price is usually $20-30/yard for virgin cloth.
3. Kevlar: fun to work with but I wouldn't use it exclusively. Kevlar has many of the same properties as Carbon, except it's more flexible and you can't cut it without Kevlar shears. This is easier to see when it's wet out (turns a darker "banana yellow" from its standard "bright yellow" color -- hard to explain but when you use it you'll know what I mean
). It also provides some degree of zipper protection, however it's harder for the fiber to do anything when it's constrained in the matrix with resin. Priced similar to carbon but a little cheaper ($15-25/yard).
So... yeah. Also another thing to keep in mind -- you need to put a light layer of glass over either Carbon or Kevlar to keep it from fuzzing when you finish it. Yeah, yeah, the composites guys say "you don't need a veil because you shouldn't sand the fabric anyways". But believe me, your sandpaper will nick ONE fiber in the Kevlar and it'll be impossible to get it out of the paint job. Been there, done that
Remember that you'll need a high quality resin (e.g. Aeropoxy (nb: my favorite -- it's CHEAP!), West System, System Three) to hold it all together, epoxy based filler to finish dings and imperfections (and fill the overlap), and high build primer to fill the weave (trust me, it's hard without it -- scraping filler over the WHOLE airframe then sanding it off, then again, and again, ad nauseam).
One more thing... Enjoy working with it! I love working with composites.