I got some samples of the chopped carbon fiber filled PLA and high temp PLA from the ProtoPlant Kickstarter as well as some 1.75mm XT and woodfilled PLA from colorFabb to test out this past weekend.

All of these materials had some cool properties that might be useful in the right applications. The Carbon Fiber is incredible stiff, but has the tradeoff of being more brittle than standard PLA. Both the woodfill and carbon fiber materials had some improved bridging performance from the fill.
I still do have a decent amount of the high temp PLA left (maybe 50grams?), so if anyone has suggestions for a good test, I'd be glad to try it out.

If you're interested in checking out the results, I put up a blog post here: [www.printedsolid.com]

Full disclosure: I am the US reseller for colorFabb. I resell the PLA/PHA and XT materials, but the woodfill is only available direct from the company. I have no relationship to ProtoPlant. Link to my site is in my signature per forum guidelines.

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Matthew Gorton
US Reseller for colorFabb filaments
3D Printing and Design services
[www.printedsolid.com]

Thanks for sharing the info!
I am very interested in this material and requested samples for testing it, but did not hear anything from Protoplant so far.
Nevertheless, I must also say that the result of the test of the thermal strenght of the material is a a bit misleading.
First you said, that you did not follow the instruction on how to active the filler (using a waterbath). Heating the test objects on the heated bed, seems to be a different thing. The heat distribution is much different from a waterbath. So it is uncertain, if that method really activated the filler.
Secondly I would not have added a coin as weight on top of the bridges. The metal will store the heat of the oven and add thermal + mechanical stress to your testing objects, which may result in a very small fail -temperature-window.
It appears that the carbon PLA has no better thermal strenght than normal PLA. Which may be true, but I do not think that this setup could proove it.
So if there is material left, I would suggets to repeat the test following the test procedures that the company uses and see if their results can be reproduced.
Because the thermal strenght feature is the main reason people may want to buy this filament.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/2013 06:51PM by maboo.

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