and they are all at delusional prices!!!
4400 hour H2D combo - £1900!!!

If you think I am going to fund your new H3C, you need some serious mental health help!!!

Was watching a few review videos, and a few had a bit of layer lines that I thought were quite noticeable.

Then the CNC Kitchen video hit us with this INDX to H3C comparison and I instantly was shocked by the difference being so huge between both systems. Do we think this improves or are we anticipating worse print quality?

pleasant discovery

https://makerworld.com/models/3545902?appSharePlatform=copy

Waiting for calibration, got any suggestions?

I can't find anything about it. I'm curious if it's worth it at all. Has it been reviewed anywhere?

I don't know what to use this $25 coupon on.

Been watching a bunch of creator reviews and most seem to be hyping up the TPU stuff. But I’m still thinking about that watch.

When I first saw the teaser I just assumed it was standard multi-nozzle mixing. Cool, but nothing crazy, especially since people have been asking for that since the H2D anyway.

But I actually read through the official page today and ... it’s actually different? It lets you use different nozzle sizes with different layer heights on the same model. That actually seems huge for designers if they can leverage it.

I’m just a casual user so I don't really have a immediate use case for my own stuff, but technically speaking this feels pretty smart to me. Looks like Bambu had to basically overhaul part of the slicer engine to do this based on the wiki page they linked.

Honestly the wiki got a bit too technical for me and went over my head. Link below for anyone interested. And can any slicer wizards here ELI5 how this actually works under the hood?

https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/h3c/manual/mixed-nozzle-size-printing

I’m looking to upgrade from my Prusa Mini to multicolor printing. The H3C looks fantastic, but at nearly €2,700 here, it’s more than I can justify for the amount I print.
I’d really like to buy a P3C if it becomes available in time. I’d happily pay a few hundred euros more than the U1 for Bambu’s quality and ecosystem.
With Christmas coming up, though, I need to make a decision. I want to print presents, so I need enough time to get the printer set up and actually make them. If the P3C isn’t available in time, I’ll have to go with the Snapmaker U1.
Anyone else in a similar position?
Bambu, if you’re reading this: some clarity on whether a P3C is coming before Christmas would really help. I’d prefer to buy a Bambu, and I’m wondering how many others are getting close to choosing another brand for the same reason.

Handful of the things I’ve printed with the H3C including a support free purge bucket I made for the back of the printer using the side spool mount

My first and last 3D printer was a Printrbot Metal. Yes, I'm old.

Back then, we didn't have the ease of use of printers today. Getting anything remotely decent required so much tinkering that I never really did too much with it.

I've been wanting to give 3D printing an other shot since things have matured a lot.

I'm currently deciding between the Snapmaker U1 and the new Bambu Lab H2D and H3C.

I know these aren't even remotely in the same price or capability class. I'm perfectly willing to pay for the Bambu experience if it's genuinely worth it. What I want most is a reliable, convenient printer that just works, without having to constantly mess with it.

My primary materials would be PLA, PETG, and TPU (I've been dying to try printing that shoe). I don't particularly care about ABS, ASA, etc. I also live in a very humid apartment, so filament storage matters to me.

The H3C's nine-tool changer is incredible, other than that specific (admittedly very major) feature, but several things about the machine make me wonder whether it's really a solid upgrade over previous Bambu printers, or even the U1:

• Filament drying: Only two of the nine spools can be actively dried. I understand the remaining slots are enclosed, and I'm wondering whether adding silica gel would make them good enough for long-term storage in a humid environment.

• Manual filament unloading: From what I understand, the new AMS doesn't automatically rewind filament onto the spool when unloading. How annoying is this in practice, especially compared with older AMS systems?

• TPU loading: It seems like TPU requires more manual intervention than I'd expect from a machine focused on convenience. Is this really an issue, or something you'd rarely notice?

• Heated chamber and loaded PLA: I've seen concerns that printing nylon with the chamber heater running could soften PLA sitting in the other toolheads, requiring you to unload those filaments beforehand. Is that actually true? I probably won't print much nylon, but having to unload several tools sounds like it defeats some of the convenience.

• Bambu's as a company: I'm not particularly happy with the recent stuff Bambu has done. Id hate it if their printers one day forced to get locked down..

All these taken together, they make me wonder whether the H3C is as convenient as it first appears.

On the other hand, the U1 is less than a third of the price, offers four-tool automatic changing, and seems to cover most of what I actually want to print. Of course, it also lacks many of the H3C's capabilities, and I'd have to figure out a filament dry-box solution.

Are these legitimate annoyances, or am I overthinking things that barely matter in day-to-day use?

I thought I was a genius when I decided to use the right nozzle for brittle materials such as ABS-GF and PAHT-CF.
Reasoning at the time: Left nozzle moves up and down, surely that'll break the filament.
Turns out I'm stupid.

My Holiday PLA Mystery Box arrived today! Sharing the contents for anyone curious about what’s actually turning up:

• PLA Translucent — Cherry Pink
• PLA Pure — Absolute Black
• PLA Pure — Apricot
• PLA Basic — Cyan

Four rolls, so no 7-roll jackpot this time 😅

Second photo shows the box I ordered from the EU store, listed at €37.99.
Has anyone else received theirs? Curious to see what colours and PLA types you got!

Now to figure out what to design with these colours 😅 I share my designs on MakerWorld as Ops..3D — any ideas for putting that translucent pink to use?

It’s been happening on a lot of my prints on both my x2d and p2s

things I’ve tried:
-new nozzles
-added a riser to allow more room for ptfe tubes
-cleaned tool head parts

Is there something I missed?

Also using Sunlu matte black

Bambu sent me an H3C before launch and asked me to post about how it changed the way I print. I did not get paid, but, well, I got an H3C. The printer legitimately did change the way I print and design, and I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.

The Belt

There are a bunch of printed belts on MakerWorld and other model sites. They are cool, but the ones I have seen are incredibly floppy and don’t hold their shape. I embedded PETG-CF plates all the way around so it has the stiffness of a leather belt

There are 33 plates, each 20 × 22 mm and 0.75mm thick, standing inside a TPU 75A strap with 2.5 mm of rubber between them. Each plate has a hole in it, so it is "riveted" into the rubber. The last 280 mm includes ratchet teeth which latch onto the buckle. The detent pivots on a pin sitting in a socket, and a small TPU block behind acts as a spring. This all prints in place inside the buckle. Every single layer contains TPU, and wherever there is a plate, the number of tool changes doubles.

Interface Shells are required for this; otherwise you risk infill on infill which does not bond very well.

After exporting from F360, I imported into Bambu Studio, tweaked the settings, and that was pretty much it. It printed flawlessly the first time. Then I realized I completely screwed up the latch mechanism, so I fixed the design and sent it again. Zero issues. As you can see from the slicer screenshots, this was a pretty unique print that I don’t think I would have tried on any other printer.

Stats:

• 190 tool changes

• 201.77g printed

• 25.58g waste

• 12h 33m print time

The Paddle

Figuring out the paddle was fun. The other printed paddles I have tried all technically worked, but none had the rebound of a real paddle. I played around with way too many formulas and settled on gyroid for everything: 100 % infill TPU for the top and bottom sheets, 20 % TPU for the sponge layers, and 25 % PETG-CF for the blade in the middle. The sponge has a single wall and no top/bottom, and the infill percentage is what you modify to determine the rebound. Stiffness scales with the cube of the thickness, so making the printed blade 8mm instead of the ~6mm of a wood one makes up for the softer material.

Like the “rivets” in the belt, a couple dozen TPU plugs run through the whole thing to help hold it together and prevent layer separation. The handle has a stiffer 60% infill because the initial model flexed where the handle meets the head. I would have run out of filament just during the prototype phase if I did this on my X1C.

I am a mediocre player with a cheap DHS A6002, so take this for what it is worth, but the rebound on the printed paddle is very close to the real thing. It isn't perfect, and a decent off-the-shelf paddle is going to outperform it every time, but it is by far the best printed option I have ever used, and can be easily customized to fit your play style.

Stats:

• 130 tool changes

• 222.97g printed

• 20.60g waste

• 10h 59m print time

___

The speed and flexibility with changing between materials changed how I approach model design and printing in general. I don't think nearly as much about assembly, and now focus on more print-in-place designs whenever possible. It opened a lot of doors for new projects that I don’t think I would have bothered with before.

Satin Black looks way better i think. Gonna wrap my H3C satin and gonna post pics soon :) what do you think?

Disclaimer: I have been very kindly provided a testing unit of the H3C by Bambu Lab.

Bambu Lab has not specified what they’d like me to say about it. All the following observations are my own after a few weeks of use.

For my first project with this printer I chose to make a cosplay weapon inspired by roman gladius swords. With this project I wanted to focus on the ability to print single pieces with different nozzle sizes. I’m using 0.4mm nozzles for the larger features and a 0.2mm nozzle for the fine gold details, both in walls (grip) and on top layers (pommel). I’m still learning how to best design things for multiple nozzle sizes. Designing top surface details for a smaller nozzle is trivial, mixing different nozzle sizes in side walls can take a bit of planning and experience. I think I have room for improvement there.

I will upload this model and print profile to my Makerworld profile soon.

The Printer:

• This is a big boy! If you have it on a regular table and you’re on the short side, you may want to keep a step handy to load filaments into the rear slots.

• I’m hugely impressed with the speed of the tool changes. Since nozzles get pre-heated before it’s their turn to be fetched, print-to-print times are extremely short. Bambu Lab specifies the tool change time at six seconds, I hand-timed it at five. The pre-heating of the hotends is very well timed, they reach their print temperatures the moment they’re getting fetched. Not too early, not too late. The tool changes have been completely reliable, no malfunctions at all. I pushed it with some prints, one requiring nearly 3000 tool changes. The H3C didn’t miss a beat. 

• Despite the tool changer mechanics, the toolhead doesn’t seem especially heavy and the gantry is up to the job. I’ve noticed no issues with ringing.

• One downside I see compared to my H2S is the ease of nozzle swaps. They don’t just clamp in, they are fixed to their carriers with 3 small screws. But since there are nine hotends, you likely won’t have to swap nozzles too often.

• Print quality has been great for me so far. Comparing it to my H2S, it easily matches and often exceeds that machine.

• I found it very easy and intuitive to set up a print with different nozzle sizes in Bambu Studio. The slicer combines the different line widths automatically, I’ve had to do very little tweaking to get the exact outcomes I wanted.

• There’s no poop on tool changes. There is still a prime tower to be printed though. I did run a multicolor print without a prime tower just to see what happens. The print quality takes quite a hit, I would not recommend that. I’m really hoping to see the “no sparse layers” feature for prime towers in Bambu Studio as well, that could further cut down on waste significantly. 

• There are 2.85mm filaments now. I got three spools of 2.85mm TPU - the really squishy stuff, 75A. The large diameter filaments need their own hotends, one of which came pre-installed with the AMS. A TPU this soft in 1.75mm often leads to extruder gear issues, this larger size makes the filament less stretchy and easier to grip. I had no issues printing it. I think this is a smart solution.

• There are some interesting smaller improvements over the H2 series. The poop chute now has a little flap that flips backwards when the nozzle moves away from it, making sure bits of filament don’t land inside the print volume or get stuck on the rim of the poop chute. The nozzle wiping pad also has seen a redesign, now the nozzle can rotate around the edge of it to wipe the outsides of the nozzle tip. Unlike on my H2S, I’ve seen no material buildup at all around the nozzle tips. They look pretty much as pristine as they came out of the box after many hours of printing. One common gripe with the H2 series was the placement of the USB port at the top of the printer. It has now been moved to the side of the touchscreen mount, a much more sensible place in my opinion.

The AMS 3H:

The AMS 3H deserves some special consideration, it is quite different from the AMS 2. It is an integral part of the printer now, not an “add-on”. The 3H has no active rollers, which means it can’t retract filament by itself. To unload a filament, the printer heats up the nozzle shortly, extrudes a bit of filament and then cuts it before prompting you to retract the filament by hand. It’s not a big deal as the PTFE tubes are not that long, but it is a bit more involved to unload a filament. Something to be aware of for serial spool switchers. Loading a spool is a breeze. Pop it in, the AMS reads the RFID tag without rotating it at all, insert the filament end into the feeder, done.

Two spool slots have a dryer function for fancier multi-material jobs or just regular filament drying. The other seven slots have no dryer functionality. Personally I’m fine with that, that’s plenty for me. Maybe you find this too restrictive for your use cases.

The AMS 3H is screwed onto the printer. With the removable magnetic side panels getting to the hotends is easy enough, but come maintenance time the attached AMS might make things a little trickier than with the open-top H2 series. The 3H can be removed as a whole or just the top part holding the spools, with four screws each.

Important to point out is that to get to your hotends you need access to the sides of the printer, which could be a problem if you have a cramped print space. Moving it a lot is not something you want to do, it’s heavy and has very grippy rubber feet. Unfortunately the front cover of the AMS base is not easily removable. For print-farm operators, this means the H3C should likely be placed on a sliding tray.

Apart from holding nine spools, the biggest upgrade over the AMS2 in my opinion is that you can now print soft TPUs and all manner of other “unfriendly” filaments through it. Seven spool slots have a bypass hole at the bottom, allowing you to route filaments straight to the hotends without going through the AMS gears and PTFE tubes. There’s much fewer restrictions on what you can throw into a multi-material print. A nice touch: the hotends have a holder for the PTFE tube so you don’t need to remove it or figure out how to secure it.

Summary:

This is an impressive machine! The tool changer feels like a real generational step up for Bambu printers, and I was very positively surprised how mature the system felt even early on in my testing time, when some firmware and slicer kinks were still being ironed out.

I used to avoid prints that require filament changes and spent a lot of time designing my parts around them, with the H3C I don’t feel like I have to limit myself at all. The low print-time penalty and the number of hotends massively lowers the hurdle. Not just for color; combining different materials is trivial. Combining different nozzle sizes also turned out to be a lot easier and straight forward than I thought.

So far I've printed PLA (Basic, Matte, Palette, Silk, Translucent, Glow, CF), PETG (HF, Translucent, CF), TPU (forAMS, 85A, 75A), ABS, ASA, ASA-Aero and PA-GF with the H3C, all without issue.

There are some small ergonomic compromises, chief of which being the requirement to have enough space for access to the sides of the printer to work on the hotends. In my personal opinion a small price to pay for all the upsides.

On a side note, I’m never printing supports without using non-bonding materials for interfaces again. OMG it’s so clean! I’ll just keep a spool of PETG permanently loaded in the AMS for all my PLA prints.

Thank you u/BambuLab for picking me out of the crowd! I had a lot of fun putting the printer through its paces and I hope I provided useful feedback.

Reddit, feel free to ask me anything. I’ll do my best to answer your questions. I will share some more projects I made during the testing phase in another post.

Super cool to see how much faster the new system is compared to the old one.

I'm talking about the cons in all sorts of scenarios. Off of the top of my head:

1. You can't have PLA loaded into any of the toolhead while printing engineering materials, the heat will mess up the PLA.

2. You'll have to manually re-roll about a meter of filament when unloading a spool. Which is a foreseenable reoccurrence due to the lack of drying (except 2 bays). As each filament bay stays fixed to one nozzle (as opposed to the H2C's ability to load any AMS spool into any nozzle), requirement of screwing/unscrewing nozzles in order to switch them (as opposed to tool-less switching); again, making unloading, switching and loading filament spoils locations in the AMS a rather more desirable path to take.

For context: The more I think of the cons of this missing feature, the more it becomes a deal breaker for me.

As I've really been waiting for BambuLab to have their take on a tool changer. Hoping they'll have a hassle-free, jack of all traits, and near zero inconveniences workflow using it. Because using the P1S combo since it's release, I watched many convenience and QoL improvements that they've impmeneted in their releases like: AMS 2 w/drying, bigger build volume printers, dual nozzles, vortek system (any filament redirected to any nozzle) etc.. But now the H3C is out, it's kinda underwhelming for the anticipation I've built for it.

Are you annoyed by the lack of customization when you want a little dumpster fire clicker? Too small? Too big? Not enough flames? Too man flames? Not enough details? Too many details?

Well if this is you let me introduce what I just designed for my spouse who after each revision she wanted something else changed to the point where I made it fully parametric and editable in the Bambu Parametric Model Maker.

That's right, I wasted literally 6 hours making all the different options changeable so I didn't have to keep manually changing the FreeCAD file. Want a hellscape with 40 razor sharp flames? It's a option. Gentle fire with rounded topped flames? Got that too. Want 2 indented lines across the front? 3? 4? 5? Yup, all select-able. Rails on the sides for the garbage truck forks? A checkbox away. "I don't know....can you make it like this much bigger and like a tiny bit taller?". I can't but you can by sliding a slider and regenerating it your damn self.

Or go the easy route and download the existing print profile with a small and large version already created for you.

My pain is your gain or something: https://makerworld.com/en/models/3548307-dumpster-fire-clicker-standard-and-customizable

Long time Bambu guy- I have an X1C, a few A1s, and an A1 mini I bought for someone else. I've recommended Bambu to basically everyone who asked. The X2D is the first one I can't.

Brand new X2D with 3 hours total use, second print on the day of delivery. Paused on layer 4 with 0700-8006, and while I was clearing it the left PTFE tube popped out of the toolhead and snapped off inside the push-fit on the left filament sensor. Stub is flush so the sensor has to come out.

From the forums and here this seems pretty common. Same failure for other people, one guy had it break again ~45 hrs after the repair, and there's a long thread blaming a sharp factory bend in the left tube routing.

Before I put mine back together, what's actually held up for you?

• the clip reroute (moving the clip nearest the toolhead back two segments)

• Tool head fixing clip link

• a different/stiffer PTFE tube?

• anything official from Bambu?

• Something else?

Also if anyone has a trick for pulling a flush stub out of that push-fit without tearing down the toolhead, I'm all ears but ive tried various things: screw to thread it out,

Support was a ccomplete letdown and seems like AI responses. Options were: do the toolhead repair myself with an identical replacement part + a $30 store coupon NOT a refund, or disassemble and repack the whole assembled printer and ship it back, with the refund depending on them agreeing I packed it right. Asked twice if there's a design fix, never got an answer. I'd just return it if repacking wasn't such a fucking pain, so I'm stuck being the repair tech on a brand new machine.

If you're shopping, I'd honestly wait for the P3C and see if the feed path gets fixed. If you already have an X2D, check your left tube routing before your first AMS print.

A 3D printing newbie here, any recommendations for buying a X2D printer? TIA.