One of the most time consuming aspects of many DIY projects is identifying and sourcing materials. Living in a globalized world and having the ability to link everything online has made this a lot easier. Today, it is by far much more convenient and budget friendly to directly shop in Asia, cutting out all of the so called “added value” (which is just a nice euphemism for making stuff artificially expensive to the end user, so that politicians can claim to “create jobs” and society can try to keep up the illusion of the necessity of full-time employment and camouflaged slavery for everyone).
The last F3l1ks sprint included the task to evaluate carbon fiber as a printing surface, so we had to get carbon and wanted to give the german market another chance. We've found about 15 carbon product manufacturers online with focus on manufacturers and not simple re-sellers. One thing became pretty clear: If you don't have a web-shop or at least a website with information about your products, you simply don't exist anymore. These 15 sources all got the same eMail, describing our needs and specifications in detail (carbon fiber sheets in 0.3 and 0.5mm with the specific size of the printbed and temperature considerations) to get a fair quote with the option to send us test material for free.
Out of these 15, only 7 sent a reply. From these, 2 dropped directly out as being re-sellers, not offering any individual service. One just sent as link to their shop for some carbon foil, clearly not even having read our eMail. One shop replied that they have sent out testing material, but it never arrived and we never heard from them again, another was just trying to rip us off. That left only one carbon supplier on our list, but they came trough all the way:
when you are looking for carbon fiber sources in Germany, you can repeat the whole process as we did (took about 3 weeks to give slower candidates a fair chance) or go directly to:
where you get fair prices and good customer service. And of course we'd like to thank the whole team again for sending us testing sheets for free for our tests and are looking forward to working together in the future, for custom carbon CNC jobs.