I love this thing
I hate this thing
My Prusa is in the garage now. It just ran and ran, but it never handled supports well. Maybe I didn’t take the time to dial it in, I don’t know.
I do know that I ran 6000 meters of filament through it. It is a workhorse. It is a Volkswagen Beetle, a Model T Ford.
My Bambu on the other hand, is finicky in ways I didn’t think a printer would be. Again, some of it may be user error, but there is a lot going on there that just might be bad design.
I only run Bambu labs filament through it. Maybe that’s my problem. I assumed that since there is a lot of effort to read the filament core via RFID tag, that the filament would be correctly dialed in… Maybe that is a bad assumption.
The black PLA I bought isn’t great. It clogs the print head. It clogs the drive gear.
More fun, recently I have had a bunch of refills of PETG show up damaged. The cores, which fit onto a split reel that comes apart, are so crushed that they don’t easily mount on the cores, and when they finally do so, the filament has been redistributed into to a narrower bundle that allows filament to slip past and jam.
In all fairness, they have been trying to replace the refills once (with damaged product) and are now sending me complete reels.
I have had two of their LIDAR cameras fail to function. The first a few months after use, the second after a few weeks. I cannot tell you why they malfunctioned, only that they did, I am waiting on a response from tech support for the second camera.
The cleaning mechanism partially relies on a nozzle wipe on the build plate. My build plate has ~.2mm of wear in a small patch. That small patch overhangs off the back of the plate. I have seen pictures online where that patch is present, but centered so the wear is surrounded by unworn bed material. Not sure how it happens, but I was having filament jam the Z axis homing. It started with the wear pattern getting bad, and stopped when I flipped the build plate over, revealing a fresh patch of material.
The Teflon tube that feeds the extruder head wears on the glass top, mine is ~.6 mm thinner when I measure the diameter vs measuring the thickness where the flat is. This will of course be an issue.
System complexity
There are a lot of things going on in this machine. The LIDAR Unit, a small webcam with cute illuminators to examine the extruded filament is a great idea, but swinging around at the end of a print head, which I might note uses a standard USB C cable which may not be designed for this much flexing might be the issue, when the LIDAR failed the first time, they sent a new cable. That may be a bad omen, Replacing the LIDAR unit fixed the issue, the cable may be the issue now.
I think a lot of the issue come down to the AMS and the ability to swap filaments. I bought the machine for this capability but now I wonder if I should have bought a 2 head machine like a Prusa XL.
Changing filaments involves a lot of moving parts, and pulling the filament in and out of the machine. This damages the filament, sometimes to the point of damaging it so much that it gets stuck in the print head.
There is a blade in the print head to cut the filament when you change from one filament to the next. That has jammed once, but that blade won’t last forever so you need to replace it from time to time.
When you change filament, there is a waste chute, a wiping mechanism, and a chute clearing lever. When the machine changes from one material to the other, it has to expel the filament that is between the blade and the nozzle tip into this chute, wipe the nozzle clean, and then run a purge tower to remove the last bits of material by printing it out before proceeding to print the new filament.
They call this filament poop, since it ejects out of the back of the machine. My machine poops all over the inside of the chamber. it gets stuck in the chute and pulled back out and dragged all over the place.
The AMS unit itself is a complex system, spitting out, sucking sucking back up, changing from one filament to the next, all via a controlled system of tubes, motors and RFID tag readers.
The full system calibration involves checking motor resonances and things like that. I am guessing there is an accelerometer suite in the head, maybe motor current monitoring, not sure.
There is a lot to this machine.
Itty Bitty System Complexity
There are a lot of itty bitty little connectors. When I had to replace the print head after a permanent clog, I was shocked. There are three connectors on the print head, heater, fan and thermistor. They are way up inside the machine behind a cover that is held on with a couple of magnets. Getting them off and on is a serious challenge. I used to design and build micro optical systems, I have the tools for the job, micro pliers, lights and Surgical magnifiers and exquisite Swiss tweezers.
When I had to replace the LIDAR unit, I really struggled.
When I had to look for a jam in the AMS I struggled with short flex board cables.
These things are a great way to save space and in the case of the print head, mass, but this isn’t consumer level stuff by a long shot.
What it gets right
First layer adhesion
Speed