S-glass fibreglass cloth

E-Glass is the industry standard glassfibre cloth – usually a straight weave with a balance of fabric in the warp and weft of the cloth.  Seabase stocks a wide and varied range of e-glass cloths of exceptional quality of clarity, cleanliness, wet-out and drapability for marine craft construction ,but especially for surfboards and SUP’s.

S-glass (alumino silicate glass without CaO but with high MgO content with high tensile strength) is an especially clean version of E-Glass made by introducing super-heated carbon rods into melted glass to burn off impurities and Calcium Oxide. “S” stands for Strong, Stiff or Space, depending on who you believe, but it was first made for ballistic missiles where quality of laminates was a prime requisite.

Glassfibre is a material consisting of numerous extremely fine fibres of glass. Glass makers throughout history have experimented with glass fibres, but mass manufacture of glass fibre was only made possible with the invention of finer machine tooling. Glass fibre has roughly comparable mechanical properties to other fibres such as polymers and carbon fibre. Although not as strong or as rigid as carbon fibre, it is much cheaper and significantly less brittle when used in composites. Glass fibres are therefore used as a reinforcing agent for many polymer products; to form a very strong and relatively lightweight fibre reinforced polymers (FRP) composite material called glass-reinforced plastics (GRP), also popularly known as “fiberglass”.    – thanks wikipedia.