May 2020 - Learn ColorFabb

Our very first special filament, woodFill, remains one of the most fun materials to print with. Not only does it print easily, it also makes your printing room smell like a woodshop due to the fact that we used real wood in our unique PLA/PHA blend. One of our colleagues, Paul (he who ships all your spools in logistics) printed a large T-Rex entirely made with woodFill with awesome results:

T-Rex Design link

Paul printed the T-Rex on the Prusa i3 using the woodFill settings. The entire print measures 39cm high and is 76cm tall. It took about 150 hours to print all the parts.

Lego minifig for scale

Launched in 2013, woodFill was our first special 3D printing filament. It has been a bestseller for over 6 years and we fully understand why: the ease of printing, the authentic wood structure and the smell of wood while printing make it a fan favorite. Read more about woodFill and its origins in last year’s blog.

As said, woodFill is a great filament to print with. Very easy and it makes for great decoration, like the world map we printed recently.

woodFill color disclaimer: due to the natural origin of woodFill (wood fibres) slight color variations may occur from batch to batch. We do not chemically process or color the filament in any way and aim to maintain the original wood look of the material.

woodFill is available now and ships daily from stock on spools containing 600 and 1800 grams. Click here to head directly to our webshop.

Eclipson Airplanes from Spain was one of the first companies to see the potential of our lightweight 3D printing filament LW-PLA, especially for their RC Plane designs. Click here to see the first blog post we made about the Model V – an RC plane specifically designed for LW-PLA.

They are now back with the release of the Eclipson TL Stream, their latest project:

All images by Eclipson Airplanes

As per Eclipson’s website: “The TL Stream is one of the best ultralight airplanes available right now on the market. The airplane has been designed and manufactured by the European company TL-ultralight. By using the latest technologies and knowledge about aerodynamics this company has been able to design a beautiful and very low drag model inspired by jet fighter planes. Our 3D printed version is inspired by that model. However, many aerodynamic features such as wing airfoil, wing torsion, dihedral, decalage, CG etc.. have been designed by us in order to improve its flight characteristics at low Reynold number. This model is a great low wing trainer, is very simple to assemble, cheap and very docile in the air. In addition to this, the low weight compared with the wing area (low wing loading) will allow you to fly pretty slowly.”

You can find more information and purchase the Eclipson TL Stream model on Eclipson’s website.

ABOUT LW-PLA

At around 230C this material will start foaming, increasing its volume by nearly 3 times. Users can decrease material flow by 65% to achieve lightweight parts, or use the expanding properties to effectively reduce print time by using big layer heights or single extra thick perimeters.

For the filament to expand it is necessary to put a certain amount of energy into the filament. The amount of energy a filament can absorb during printing depends on the length of the hot-zone and the time it takes for the filament to pass through the hot-zone. The longer a filament will reside inside the hot-end, the more energy it can absorb which will increase the amount of expansion.

Assuming nozzle size and layerheight are fixed, our main input variables are Temperature, speed and flow to determine the amount of expansion. Find out more about how to print by checking our LW-PLA print tutorial.