As part of the Celebrating Australian Made editorial series, Brent Balinski interviewed our Managing Director Clive Watts.

‘Today CST is an archetypal high-performing Aussie SME manufacturer. Its highly-skilled team exports nearly everything it makes, and makes little fuss in the process.’

Please click here to read the article.

Next stop … U.S.A.

CST Composites is going global this year with a joint venture with U.S. firm Optimum Composite Technologies.

After 26 years, the move positions CST on the path as a leading player in the global green hydrogen supply chain.

The partnership complements both companies’ manufacturing abilities, giving CST Composites access to Optimum’s technical expertise and Intellectual Property (IP) in carbon fibre pressure vessels. It also means greater access to U.S. markets for its high quality, filament-wound composite tubing by leveraging Optimum’s U.S. facilities, customer base and supply chain.CST Composites will expand its core capabilities in designing and producing Composite Pressure Vessels (CPVs) and other applications.

The Australian Government is committed to Australia being a major hydrogen player by 2030.

CST growth plans include establishing Australia’s first hydrogen vessel manufacturing facility, which will service emerging and growing demand from the defence, space, transport and energy sectors.

Click here to read the full media release.

2020 has of course been a difficult year for everyone around the world. That said, it has been an exciting year for us and our 25^th year at CST Composites.

Many milestones have been achieved throughout the year, including outgrowing our factory at Kurnell and moving production to a larger facility in Ingleburn, Western Sydney. We look forward to continuing our expansion of technology and production capacity in 2021. By no means exhaustive, here are a few of the achievements our team has made over the past year.

Technology

We’ve worked with all of our customers through periods of disruption and uncertainty to support their needs. Key to this has been the efforts made to increase our production capacity. The uncertainty brough on by COVID has greatly increased the difficulty of forecasting market demand for products, but by continuing to push the boundaries of our production capacity we have been able to meet the sudden spikes in demand caused by economies reopening. We’ve added an extra winding machine as well as increasing the level of automation across production, post processing of tubes and quality control.

One big milestone achieved in 2020 was the conversion of all production to prepreg fibre. This has numerous benefits in terms of minimising health and safety risks during production while ensuring consistency and repeatability of our products.

New products

2020 saw the launch of TowPro masts for the I14, 16ft Skiff, Sabot and Flying 11 classes. Leveraging the technology developed for our Moth TowPro range, these masts feature machined aluminium fittings, precision joining sleeves for interchangeable panels and prepreg construction. The interchangeable panels allow for fine tuning mast bend by swapping out parts of the mast rather than building a completely new spar.

We have also launched class approved products for the ILCA 6 (Radial), 49er and 49erFX. We are excited to continue powering the highest levels of competitive sailing with these new products.

We were also proud to see AMSL Aero’s Vertiia eVTOL aircraft making headlines in the Australian Financial Review. CST’s engineering and materials knowledge have been supporting the wing spar development that will see this electric Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft flying in 2021. Congratulations to the team at AMSL Aero and all involved for a job well done.

Sailing results

Congratulations to the following class champions who achieved fantastic results during 2020 using CST products:

• Archie Massey and Harvey Hillary won the I14 worlds in January, our 13^th win in this development class.
• The Australian 16ft Skiff nationals were won by Sutech Musto Racing.
• Dylan Fletcher won the UK Moth Nationals – the event originally planned to be the 2020 World Championship.
• Bryce Edwards and Josh Tasker took home the MG14 Australian Championship
• Nicolas Goyard won the Formula Foil World Championship using a Slake mast powered by CST Composites.

We wish good luck and fair winds to our team sailors competing over the Australian summer.

Merry Christmas

CST is closed for the Christmas break from the 19^th of December, restarting on the 4^th of January. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a safe and happy New Year.