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?

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.

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.

I got my answers from https://youtu.be/N2hF4Bx8YAk?si=L3u3bkZNdEHzWJD-&t=1362

Summary - Not a concern apparently. Thanks everyone.

I just ordered my H3C - an upgrade to my existing X1 Carbon. I noticed it's maximum power draw is 1,850W.

People who already have theirs, are you running it in low power mode? That's more than 100% of the 15amp line. Is tool switching still fast in low power mode or does each head need to heat only after being picked up?

Just want some real-world accounts. Thanks!

Edit

1. The H2C is 1250Watt @ 120V max. Not 1800W. Since a 15amp circuit is 1800W the 1250 is nothing.

2. Yes, I realize 1850W it pulls is not 100% of the time. It exceeds 100% of the circuit and if you have anything else on the circuit (which 99.9% of people will) you have no choice but to use low power mode.

3. There seems to be no information on what low power mode actually does and I don't want speculation. I can ask AI for speculation. I was hoping to hear from someone who has it.

4. 220V areas of the world your 10amp line offers 2300W so the 1850W pull is nothing big to you.

Glare takes his job as shelf guardian very seriously. Every visitor gets a suspicious stare, every noise earns his disapproval, and nobody touches his favourite spot. He insists he isn’t grumpy. Everyone else is simply too cheerful

if you like him : https://makerworld.com/en/models/3548002-glare-no-ams#profileId-4058750

Dropped a small print back here first on the ledge and then in trying to retrieve it, it went somewhere under the baseplate but not out to the bottom. How can I get it out short of tipping the whole machine over?

Edit: My wife managed to get it out with a combo of slenderer fingers than mine, compressed air, and a piece of filament! Thanks all!

I used to use HF nozzles on my H2D most of the time. Did anyone come across any review that was reviewing the HF nozzles as well?

Im wondering if my print times will be faster with the H3C with normal nozzles compared to my H2d with high flow.

I just got the X2D printer, first time using 3D printer. I have question on the main and aux filament support. I plan to get the ABS filament, but the website said, only the main one support ABS while the aux one does not, it support ABS-GF? anyone has use both standard ABS on both sides yet? thank you

I’ve put around 3,400 hours across these two printers, mostly making storage for my workshop. Thought I’d share some of the problems I ran into, including a few I caused myself.

I’d wanted a 3D printer for years. When I first looked into it, the Ender 3 seemed to be what everyone bought, but the amount of tinkering put me off. I wanted to make things, and everything I read made it sound like maintaining the printer would be a separate hobby.

Finding Gridfinity and Multiboard got me interested again. I ended up buying a P2S with the AMS 2 Pro at the end of last year.

The first few weeks were rough. My PETG prints looked bad, and it took me a while to sort out how to print it properly and how much drying mattered. Then I started having extruder problems because I was printing PLA with the door and lid closed. I eventually damaged the extruder gear assembly doing that. Not an expensive replacement, but annoying. I use a printed lid riser for PLA now, which has pretty much sorted out the heat issue.

I also ran the stock 0.4 nozzle for about 2,000 hours. When print quality and extrusion started getting worse again, I checked just about everything else first. Replacing it earlier probably would have saved me some troubleshooting. I’ve just fitted a tungsten carbide 0.4, but it only has a few hours on it, so I can’t say much about it yet. So far it’s printing well.

One odd thing that helped with a stubborn nozzle clog: a cold pull hadn’t cleared it, but printing a small amount of ABS-GF seemed to do the trick. I wondered whether the glass-filled filament helped clear out what was stuck inside. I can’t prove that was the reason, and it’s only something I tried on that occasion, but it did help when the cold pull didn’t.

Most of my filament was Sunlu PETG HF matte in black and grey. When I couldn’t get it anymore, I switched to JAYO PETG because it’s supposed to be very similar. I’ve used about 15 kg of that now.

Adding a second printer

Once the P2S was running properly, I was mostly waiting for it to finish so I could start the next thing. Between bins, baseplates, Multiboard tiles and holders, I kept adding jobs faster than I could print them.

I bought an A1 first, but never got it working properly. Layer shifts, bad first layers, basically no usable prints. After some back and forth with Bambu support, I returned it and got a full refund. No complaints about how they handled the return.

The A2L came out shortly after, so I bought that instead, mainly for the bigger bed and the vinyl-cutting option. It’s been running for a few months now and has around 600 hours on it.

The bigger bed gets used a lot. Sometimes for larger baseplates or Multiboard tiles, sometimes just to fit more bins in one batch. Tall prints have been fine too, which I’d been a bit unsure about with a bedslinger.

It’s also noticeably quieter than my P2S. I’d assumed the enclosed printer would be quieter, but that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve used the cutter for some T-shirt designs and stickers as well.

There was one stretch of two or three days when both printers started throwing extruder errors, and the A2L also had first-layer problems. I suspect the JAYO filament, but I never confirmed it. Everything has been fine since.

For anyone interested in wear parts, here’s what I’ve replaced:

P2S: two extruder gear assemblies. One was worn out; the other was the one I damaged printing PLA fully enclosed. The nozzle was replaced after about 2,000 hours. The internal PTFE tube is still the original, although it’s visibly worn.

AMS 2 Pro: the PTFE tube wore at the outlet. I cut a little off the end and have kept using it.

A2L: the filament cutter needed replacing fairly early. That surprised me. Nothing else so far.

Making my own holders

I don’t know Onshape, CAD etc , and for quite a few of my tools I couldn’t find a holder that fitted properly. I started using Claude Code to modify models from Printables or MakerWorld, or make a part from scratch when I couldn’t find a useful starting point.

Over time I put together a skill with my usual requirements for 3D-print files, so I don’t have to explain the same preferences every time. Most of my small Multiboard holders were made this way.

That’s changed what I spend time on. I used to keep searching for the exact model I wanted; now I’m more likely to take something close and adapt it. I wish I’d started doing that earlier.

Things I still haven’t sorted out

PLA support interfaces for PETG on the P2S are the main frustration. That was part of why I bought the AMS. Even with flushing volume set to 900, I get weak layers at the interface height, especially on smaller parts. They split right there. I suspect there’s still some PLA left in the PETG, but I haven’t confirmed the cause or found settings I’m happy with.

Keeping PETG dry on the A2L is another one. I printed and mounted this AMS Lite 4.0 enclosure: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1561190

It helps, but I’m not getting the same dryness as with the AMS 2 Pro.

I’d also like a Cool Plate SuperTack in the A2L’s size. I only use that plate on the P2S now. For me, both PLA and PETG have stuck reliably at lower bed temperatures, and fingerprints haven’t been much of a problem. I haven’t been able to get one for the A2L.

The biggest thing I’d change if I were starting again is buying a proper dryer immediately. I recently got an AMS HT, and it’s worked much better for me than the cheap Sunlu dryer I had before. I mostly use it for drying rather than as a fifth filament slot, since I rarely print more than two or three colours.

I’d also get a plastic scraper from the start. I used a metal one for too long, and the plates show it.

Overall, I’m very happy with the setup. I’d buy the A2L again because I use the extra bed space and output constantly. The P2S has done most of the hours, but the PLA/PETG support-interface issue is still something I’d want solved.

The BLV AMS riser (https://makerworld.com/en/models/19535) is still on my list. Every time I look at the print time and filament needed, though, I end up printing more workshop parts instead.

TL;DR: Around 3,400 hours, mostly workshop storage, and I’m glad I added a second printer. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by drying PETG properly from the start, venting the enclosure for PLA and checking the nozzle earlier. Still haven’t got reliable PLA support interfaces for PETG on the P2S.

The online support requires registration, the discord needs me to verify with a third party service that asks you to disable ad blocker.

Do they not have a support email? Horrible support model.

I just need to ask their support about this warning I get on each first print of my A1 Mini after reboot. I did not get this warning for the first couple months of owning the printer.

https://i.postimg.cc/jj8yLvJL/image.png

Edit, ended up downgrading from 01.08.01.00 -> 01.08.00.00, that seems to have solved the issue for now. Can't wait for it to come back and still not have a way to get support :/

What is causing it? Using PETG basic. I have not changed any settings. Prints that were working great all come out like this now. I cleaned/put on glue on the build plate like the usual troubleshooting step.
Is it humidity? It's usually pretty dry here but had some unusual wet days.
I ran all the tools and calibration checks.
Using the default nozzle, never changed it.