I've printed quite a bit with carbon fiber on my rep2 with a PLA based one. Its a bit different than the ABS but I can still give you some insights.
I agree with you, printing is beautiful. I've never ever had issues printing it. Almost seems to work better than PLA. Be warned though, buy a second nozzle. It destroys your nozzle quite quickly. We kill a nozzle per .75kg roll of filament which isnt too fun to change out. The nozzle issue isnt the end of the world, but you do need to account for having a new one otherwise your future prints will be terrible. We own four rep2s, so I only let one printer ever use that filament.
It seems stronger than the base material, but we did some stress testing on it and it actually proved to be a bit weaker. We did both compression testing and bend testing and it was a little bit weaker in both. It is considerably lighter though which is where we use it when we have a long arm and need the smallest moment possible.
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Originally Posted by rsegrest
- Filament - Carbon Fiber reinforced ABS
- Printer - Makerbot Replicator 2x
- Mechanical Comparison - Seems to be stronger and slightly lighter weight than the ABS. My printer doesn't like PLA and we have not tried the PET so can't compare to those. Trade off is that it is a more brittle in thinner prints, just doesn't have the flex that ABS has. We are planning to do some real stress testing with the machine shop instructor. He has some nifty tools we are going use to test the tensile strength compared to ABS. Will post those when we have them.
- Print temp - I run it at about 210c.
- Ease of print - AMAZING. Don't know about you guys that have 3D printers but about 1/2 the time it seems the room temp and humidity (thank you East Texas weather) warp my ABS jobs or they have trouble sticking to the bed. Not so with CF/ABS. Out of 20+ print jobs with it only one failed to adhere and that was a user error (ID-10-T for the techie friends out there and it was all on me
 ).
Appearance of print - We like it MUCH better than ABS. It is a true matte black finish and significantly smoother to the touch even with the exact same print settings. - Cost - Our supplier sells it for $39.95/lb.
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