I cannot believe they cannot spray the outer section on completion of manufacturing. After all this is option in the manufacture practice. I just think its a money saving practice and not making a top quality product. I don`t believe the exposed carbon it harder than other poles on the market. I don`t see why we need to pay top dollar when there are pole on our market which are better finished. This will come into my mind when I buy my next poles. Sorry Alex but its how I feel.
Hi slap bash
It is very easy to have the carbon fibre tube sections sprayed up with a coating in the manufacturing process and is what some firms have tried in the past. In fact some factories have tried to convince me to do this in the past as it would also reduce the cost of the tubing.
However the carbon-fibre surface on a pole is far harder than any sprayed on coating would be. Whilst spraying pole sections is fine for older poles that have already had some wear - doing so on a new pole would offer no benefits, but would actually cause the pole to wear faster.
The reason that many factories prefer offering sprayed up tube sections is that it allows them to be less careful in the manufacturing lay-up as they can then grind the tube sections to a level and even surface afterwards and spray on a perfect top coat (hence the reduction in manufacturing costs). However this top coat will always wear quicker than the carbon fibre finished surface. This would then cause tolerance issues as the pole would wear very quickly in high abrasion zones and be much larger in un-worn areas. Carbon fibre is much like ceramic in that the outer layer is just as hard as all of the material down through the layers.
So producing non-coated, pure carbon fibre sections is the best and most costly way of producing high quality carbon fibre tubes.
Some carbon tube sections have a high gloss finish on them which looks great. However carbon fibre is not a clear high gloss finish so this means that to get this finish another layer has been added of top of the carbon. This is usually a layer of gloss epoxy resin. Whilst this looks good, it will also wear more quickly than matt finish carbon fibre. It also means that per metre the section has less carbon content and as a result will be fractionally less stiff and slightly heavier.
It is interesting that in the last few years two competitors to the SLX range were introduced and one of them was introduced with a sprayed on coated finish. I saw examples of this pole that had the top coat wearing off within just 1 week of use and causing tolerance issues. The other one released shortly afterwards had a gloss finish and was touted as not causing black hands. This gloss finish was later dropped and has now been replaced with a similar matt carbon finish to the SLX - the gloss finish did not stop carbon wear and in fact it was not as hard wearing.
I hope that this has helped explain why we have chosen the more expensive and technically more difficult process of having matt carbon top surface on our pole sections.
