When the application sits next to a sensor head or inside a scanned envelope, steel and alloy become the enemy. A fair slice of our CNC deck work goes into inspection rigs, CT table brackets, and encoder mounts where metal costs signal and calibration time.
Epoxy-carbon plate and thin-wall cured tubes get specced for a specific combination:
Dielectric behavior: no eddy currents dragging on inductive probes
Low Z contrast: radiolucent under CT and fluoroscopy tables
Dimensional memory under clamp load: better than printed nylon, no thermal creep like some thermoplastics
CNC edge integrity: slot, counterbore, and step-mill in one setup without re-fixturing
We cut these from flat epoxy laminate and small-diameter cured tubes, hold the bore and mounting pattern on the same datum, and leave the surface free of peel-ply residue for clean probe seating.
If the part goes inside a metrology cell, "looks like carbon" is not the qualification. The dielectric and tolerance package is.
