Rods will be a carrot to the fish

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Ian Cloke

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Two Fife scientists have developed a new material made from carrots to replace glass fibre found in everything from fishing rods to car parts.

The inventors, Dr David Hepworth and Dr Eric Whale, plan to start selling fishing rods made from the material, called Curran, next month.

They then hope to move on to carrot fibre snow boards.

The material is billed as a revolutionising performance product with unique strength and weight.

Through a special process, nano fibres found in carrots are extracted and combined with high-tech resins enabling tough, durable components to be moulded to whatever shape, degree of stiffness, strength or lightness required.

They also use colourful backgrounds, which have been taken from university research involved in advanced aerospace technologies.

Just Cast

Through their company CelluComp, the duo will initially enter the sporting goods market with the launch in March of Just Cast, a unique, high performance range of fly fishing rods offering lengths of 7.5ft to 10ft.

Dr Hepworth said: "Curran is incredibly versatile and we believe that we are launching at a time when companies are looking for that combination of quality and performance but achieved in a way that is environmentally friendly.

"The potential of Curran is enormous and if we can replace just a small percentage of carbon fibre in products the effects on the environment could be significant and wide ranging."
 
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Deanos

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Piffle!
The average carrot is only about 6? long?far too short to even make a fishing rod for a garden gnome!
There are some idiots out there who will tell you anything.
If you want to own something really useful, I have invented a pastry that can be moulded into walking boots, then after a hard days walking, you can fill them with a nice warming hot pot for your tea!
It can also be moulded into knee pads for carpet fitters, or even false buttocks should you only have a small bottom, and wish to impress your friends with your new rear end without resorting to expensive plastic surgery!
Car parts out of carrots!?how daft can you get
 
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Ron 'The Hat' Clay (ACA)

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It's you who are talking piffle Deanos!

Nanofibres will be the future of many new materials and if we can make the manufacture of these materials as "green" as possible, so much the better.

I would like to handle a fly rod made of this stuff. If, as they say, it exhibits superior dampening properties then look out carbon fibre.

Anyone who is a fly fisher will know that the tendency of a blank to recover from bending without vibration will enable longer and more accurate casts to be made. Zero vibration or wobble, is of course the Holy Grail in rod design, together with stiffness and low mass.

I may contact this company shortly.
 
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Ron 'The Hat' Clay (ACA)

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This is exciting.

I have just spoken with Dr David Hepworth who tells me that this material is lighter, stronger and dampens in half the time of the best carbon fibre fly rods.

They are setting up to manufacture several hundred rods by March and will have product available for inspection at "Go Fishing".

The aim is of course to make fly rods only, where these unique properties can be fully utilised and appreciated.

The rods will not be cheap, however they will be about half the price of the best rods available.

I am itching to get my hands on one.
 
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Ron 'The Hat' Clay (ACA)

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I'll bet a thousand pounds that they don't!
 
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Ron 'The Hat' Clay (ACA)

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So what is a nanofibre?

It is a fibre who's diameter is measured in nanometres. 1 nanometre is one thousandth of a millionth of a meter or put in another way 0.001 microns.

Nanofibres can be manufactured from cellulose which is the basis of all living plants. Some plants have the property of being able to be formed into smaller diameter fibres than others, hence the use of carrots in this particular instance.

The fibres are mixed with resins in much the same way as a carbon blank is made. However that's where it ends!

The tube is made by moulding the material around a mandrel, not wrapping it. The days of the "spine" which causes a preferred plane of bending are over.

Another Holy Grail achieved!

I have done a little work some years ago on the feasibility of carbon nanofibres in the filtration industry.

However there is no doubt that in 5 years time, many of us will be using rods made from carrot nanofibres.
 
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Laurie Harper

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This is just too good to be true. My other passion is cycling - was thinking of investing in a high quality carbon bike, but think I'll wait for carrot frames to appear on the market. Presumably, it'll be any colour you like as long as it's orange...
 
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Ron 'The Hat' Clay (ACA)

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OK Jonny, this is what I know.

Nanofibres are made from cellulose which is one of the most abundant naturally recuring polymers on earth. It's all around us, eg: plants and in it's processed stage: paper and cardboard.

The nanofibres are produced by electrospinning which is squeezing the liquid polymer through a tiny orifice whilst applying a high voltage current.

This creates an extremely fine fibre. Cram enough of these fibres together and you have enormous surface area and most of all, because each fibre has tensile strength, you have the ability to create incredible tensile strength in a very small volume. Much more than glass fibre or carbon fibre.

These nanofibres can be created from scrap materials such as cotton, paper or even left over vegetables. The process is totally renewable and in time such materials will totally replace steel in many applications. It also requires a great deal less manual labour than steel, and enables human effort to be re-directed to far greater and more productive endeavours

As you are aware, the manufacture of steel is not very environmently friendly but I'll not go into that now.

Nanofibre technology has a very exciting future indeed, Let's hope it doesn't get bought out by dirty industry vested interests.
 
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Ron 'The Hat' Clay (ACA)

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Even Chris Yates will have to admit that the wheel has turned full circle and that we are now making fishing rods out of pure organic materials.
 
njb51

njb51

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Thanks Ron,

What is the resin made from?

How much opposition do you think there will be (if any) from the high carbon producing nations, such as the US?

How much do you think it will be backed by government? You talk of this new material almost replacing steel so there will potentially be a massive loss in business and therefore money for the government.
 
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Ron 'The Hat' Clay (ACA)

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Basically epoxy resins are used which are composed of the resin itself and a hardener. I am not a chemist but I beleive these materials are derived from organic hydrocarbons.

There will always be opposition from the vested industrial interests of manufacturing countries whenever a new concept is invented.

However we cannot carry on polluting our planet with the burning of fossil fuels, or the processing of vast quantities of iron based metals. The production of steel for example requires enormous amounts of energy and large numbers of people.

They can even make gun barrels of plastics these days.

Steel will never be totally replaced in the future because it has a number of properties that cannot be replicated by plastics. Temperature resistance is one of them.
 
captain carrott

captain carrott

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Even Chris Yates will have to admit that the wheel has turned full circle and that we are now making fishing rods out of pure organic materials.

so what's carbon fibre then if not organic.

a resin (epoxy) with carbon in it. organic chemistry, the study of the chemistry of carbon.
so carbon fibre rods are more organic than these carrot jobs.
 
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