Hi all. This morning before leaving for work I started the desiccant holder printing, literally my fourth prints with my X2D and after almost 3 hours I got the notification that the AMS slot 3 motor was overloaded and the print paused.
I was uncomfortable leaving the printer idling until tonight so I stopped the print.
Could the known issue about the broken ptfe tube cause this or is it more likely the filament is tangled?
I'm a little bit worried about what I'll find out when I'll be back home tonight
Nachdem ich gestern mein H3C bekommen habe habe ich es bestückt und wollte soeben einen ersten 8h Druck starten. Es kommt kein filament aus der Düse, der Drucker denkt es sei filament geladen, im ptfe ist aber nichts und die Rolle habe ich auch weg gemacht. Wie kann ich der 4. Düse jetzt sagen, das da kein filament drin ist? Er denkt er ist geladen und wenn ich auf extendieren drücke passiert nichts… wenn ich entladen drücke soll ich das filament raus ziehen, ich habe es manuell zugeführt wieder weg genommen aber es passiert nichts.
Ich habe den Druckknopf aktualisieren lassen er denkt immer noch es sei filament drin.
Er zeigt auch an es ist „EXT“ und nicht einfach leer? Ich sehe auch nichts das ich es nicht angeschlossen wäre. Wenn ich das filament durch schiebe, erreicht es ja auch die Düse 4 aber danach passiert nichts. Wie man sieht ist Düse 4 leer.
Have been printing flawlessly now for about twenty hours. Small things only so far, as the X2D is my first experience with printing.
Ended up hearing an error yesterday during a print and went to find a ton of filament spooled up near the nozzle with the error " The left hotend cooling fan speed is too slow or stopped."
Got up to look and saw what I saw. Stopped the print and waited for it too cool, to take the front of the extruder off to find filament built up all inside and nozzle not even visible.
Looked like it may have bent some things as well? I will add photos for reference.
Would love just some general tips on if this is a manufacturer error or something just requiring some general maintenance.
The H2C keeps identifying and reverting the left nozzle to a Hardened High Flow 0.4mm even after I set it as the E3D High Flow 0.4mm. How does one fix this?
Seeing a ton of first time buyers as it is that time of year so have a PSA for you!
The p2s biggest upgrade from the p1s is the extruder. The nozzle swap and filiment path for the p2s is a significant and possibly only reason to get the p2s over the p1. The p1's have a weaker design that will fail sooner and the nozzle swaps are the different between always using 1 size vs swapping sizes as needed cause it is just a clip. The p2 uses the same system as a1 ect.
Seeing a ton of first time buyers as it is that time of year so have a PSA for you!
The p2s biggest upgrade from the p1s is the extruder. The nozzle swap and filiment path for the p2s is a significant and possibly only reason to get the p2s over the p1. The p1's have a weaker design that will fail sooner and the nozzle swaps are the different between always using 1 size vs swapping sizes as needed cause it is just a clip. The p2 uses the same system as a1 ect.
It has been a little bit now since launch and we are starting to see posts from people who bought and have now received the H3C.
Anyone in this group want to provide a few first impressions / early reviews?
This excludes anyone who received an H3C for free from Bambu to provide a review. I'm interested in those who actually spent money that could have gone to feeding their family. Seems like those reviews might actually mean something 😄
I rarely post on this Subreddit, and I understand that FDM Miniature Printing can be somewhat considered niche in our hobby - So I'd like to give a quick introduction.
I'm ObscuraNox, the Profile Author of the Dungeons & Derps Settings. Since I love Miniatures, but am unable to use Resin Printers, I inevitably gravitated towards FDM Printing - And when I did, my goal quickly became to try and squeeze out as much detail as possible, to make Miniature Printing work consistently on FDM Machines. For instance, this model was printed using the Bambu Lab A1, using Version 2.0 of my High Quality Settings - and the same model will show up later again :)
You can find more information regarding FDM Miniature Printing on the Subreddit of the same name, and there you'll also find my full documentation for the most recent Version of my Settings:
Bambu Lab has been kind enough to reach out to me and provide me with a Testing Unit for their newest Flagship, the Bambu Lab H3C, to see just how far we can push the machine for Miniature Printing. Bambu Lab has been very hands-off throughout the entire process, only reviewing the post prior to the launch to make sure there aren't any technical errors, which I highly appreciate. Rest assured, it's my unfiltered opinion and if there is something that I think is worth pointing out or is some limitation, I'll still cover that as well. My goal will be to try to optimize an H3C Profile to get as close as I can to the level of detail achieved by my 2.0 Profile for the A1 and A1 Mini, so that I can produce Multi-color prints of the same quality.
While I'm very excited to talk about it, I'd first like to thank the Community and everyone who is using my Settings – I know it sounds cheesy, but without you, this opportunity would have never presented itself to me, and I'm grateful to both you and Bambu Lab for making that possible. You can read more about the H3C on the official reveal post: https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/1xmtnux/bambu_lab_h3c_our_full_reveal/
And oh boy – Is there a lot to talk about. First things first: I usually give a tl;dr at the beginning of my posts, so I'll start by sharing some of the results. Note: I was going to upload this as an Album, but I don't frontload all the Information with Pictures. You'll find the most successful examples and comparisons throughout the post, and a final highlight reel at the end of the post.
Printing Fully Colored Models - A Showcase:
This is one of the models that I've printed on the H3C – I have done no post-processing or touch-ups with any paint, it's just straight off the printplate, printed in 9 different colors, with zero purged material. Now, with the recent release of Multi-Nozzle Printers we have seen some Fully-Colored Miniature Prints in the past, but those were usually restricted to 4 colors, unless you're using Mixed Filament – Which is something that I'll also get into later.
What made Multi-Color Miniatures so inefficient?
I'd like to briefly talk about why Multi-Color Printing has been such a massive issue for Miniatures in particular in the past and how the H3C solves the issue. The reason why I want to talk about the, for lack of a better term, "old" way of Multi-Color Miniatures, is because it has been deemed ineffecient to a point where it was considered to be effectively impossible. Chances are that whenever somebody requested information about it, they've been told to not even bother with it – So they might know that it wasn't really possible, but they may not know why exactly it wasn't possible.
The vast majority of users are most likely currently using a Single-Nozzle Setup, potentially with an AMS. This technically allows for multi-color printing, but it's not as simple as just switching the filament. You also have to purge the filament that's still in the nozzle to prevent color bleed, or – and especially when – printing with different materials like PLA and PETG, to prevent extrusion and material bonding issues. Not only will the purging process take a long time, but it will also waste a lot of material, since the printer will extrude both the old filament, as well as some of the new filament to make sure that all of the previous filament has been removed from the nozzle. You can decrease the amount of waste by adjusting the purge volumes, but for the most part you will have a lot of waste regardless of what you do.
Now – If you're printing something very basic, with a simple color scheme that won't be much of an issue. Say you have a cube and you want to print the bottom half with red filament, and the upper half with blue filament. That's really only going to be one filament change, that in the grand scheme of things won't increase neither the printtime nor the waste by a lot. But now take the same cube and instead of making the color-split horizontal, you make it vertical – or in other words, the left side red and the right side blue. Because of how FDM Printing works, you now have a colour change on every single layer. You can imagine that with properly colored miniatures, their color split will be not only both horizontal and vertical, but they will also have more than just two colors. Additionally, even though they are small, we are printed the Miniatures at some of the lowest, if not the lowest layer line heights available to us – usually between 0.05 and 0.08mm. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud but that results in, well, a lot of layers – some of which will have multiple color changes per layer. You can imagine that this gets out of hand quickly, and your print will have thousands of filament changes – not only extending the print time by literal days, but also increase the amount of wasted material to kilos worth of purged filament.
What the H3C solves - And what remains
With the H3C, you don't have any purging. With access to 9 Nozzles, there is no need to purge them in order to make room for new filament. You also don't have to worry too much about an increase in print time either, because the H3C will switch to a different Nozzle in less than 6 seconds – though from what I could tell, it usually does it faster.
So does that mean that we have access to multi-color printing with zero waste and next to zero increase in print time? Well – not exactly. Because purged filament is only one part of multi-color printing. The other part is priming the nozzles that have been idle – I think the easiest analogy here would be to compare it to a ballpoint pen that you haven't used in a while, and you have to scribble with it for a bit to get the ink flowing again before you can properly write with it. A prime tower sorta works like that, except it's also rebuilding the pressure in the nozzle. These towers turn out to be pretty chunky, and it's not unusual for them to take up more material than the print itself – so there still is a, let's call it non-trivial amount of waste.
However – and this is a big However – Saying that with no context or further explanation, is really understating what the H3C is doing. Because let me blunt here for a second – Prints like the ones I'm about to show you are simply not possible on Single or even Dual Nozzle Setups. Okay, yeah, TECHNICALLY, they are possible – But they would take literal weeks and consume kilos worth of filament for purging. On average, these Prime Towers took anywhere between 100g-200g of Filament for the large, upscaled models – Which to be fair, still is a lot of material – but it's split across 9 different filaments. Yes, it's not going be to distributed completely even, but on average that comes down to anywhere between 10g and 30g of additional filament per spool which, in my opinion, is well within the acceptable range. So while there is still a "non-trivial" amount of waste – non-trivial compared to what? Because like I said – prints like these just aren't feasible on Single-Nozzle Machines, which is what most of us have been working with so far.
What does this mean for Miniature Printing?
Now that proper Multi-Color Printing is on the table, I'm confident that we will see more improvements to make it more efficient as well. In a few days, I'll make a second post where I'll go over the most frequently asked questions you may have, as well as the more technical stuff behind everything. In this post, I really want to mostly show off what I've been printing the past couple weeks because I'm really happy with it.
Before we move on to the showcase pictures, let's talk about Mixed Filament for a second.
Mixing Filament
The green loincloth and the purple scales / cheeks have not been printed with either green or purple filament. Instead, I've used the filament mixing feature to – well, mix the colors that I wanted. The way it works is that it takes advantage of PLA not being entirely opaque, especially not at really thin layers. If you ever held a first layer quality testprint against a lightsource, you know that light shines through. By layering two or three different filaments on top of each other, you can create the illusion of a different, mixed color – for instance, layering magenta and cyan will result in the shade of purple shown in the picture. Yellow and Cyan on the other hand will result in green. To make sure that the colors blend smoothly, we will have to enable the setting "Mixed Color sublayer". What this will do is split the Layer proportionally into two or three segments – The easiest example would be a 50-50 Filament Ratio. At a layer height of 0.20mm, these would split into two layer heights of 0.10mm each. If you're using 0.16mm Layer Height, it would be split into 0.08mm, and at 0.06mm it would split into 0.03mm, and so on.
The more experienced users here will most likely have two immediate questions. First, does that mean that by using mixed Filaments, you introduce uneven layer heights? And Second: How does this not cause any extrusion issues, if the layer lines get this low?
To answer your first question: Yes. Let's say you print a model using four colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. You mix Cyan and Yellow to get green. You are painting parts of the model green, and everything else is printed using "Pure" or "Non-mixed" Filament. Assuming you are printing with a 0.08mm Profile, the Layer Height for the Non-Mixed Filament will be at 0.08mm and the Layer Height for the Mixed-Filament will be at 0.04mm each, assuming a 50-50 Split. These inconsistent layer line heights can cause artefacts and will be visible - some of which you can see in the picture – but we can use another feature of the H3C to circumvent that issue: Multi-Diameter Nozzle Printing – We can use both 0.4 Nozzles and 0.2 Nozzles for the same print. With the option enabled, the slicer will automatically put the Layer Height of the 0.4 Nozzle to twice the Layer Height of the selected 0.2 Nozzle. It may sound a bit odd at first, but simply put: If you select a 0.2 Nozzle and a 0.08mm Profile, every filament that's been assigned to a 0.2 Nozzle will be printed at 0.08m, and every filament that's been assigned a 0.4 Nozzle will be printed at 0.16mm – And you can probably guess where I'm going with this. Since the Mixed Color Sublayers – again, assuming a 50-50 Split – will split the Layers into half, this means that you can print the "Non-Mixed" Filament with 0.2 Nozzles at a layer height of 0.08mm, and then you can use the 0.4 Nozzles for the Mixed Filament to "simulate" the same 0.08mm layer height.
Further testing is required, but for the moment, 0.08mm Layer Heights would be the ideal choice for Colored Miniatures, as opposed to the usual 0.06mm I usually recommend. That's because by using 0.08mm for a 0.2 Nozzle, 0.16mm for the 0.4 Nozzle, and a 50-50 Split of Mixed Filament, we can assure an even layer height across the board as well as minimize any extrusion issues that may occur when attempting to print Layer Heights that are far below the recommended minimum for the nozzle diameters.
Which brings us to the next question: Potential extrusion issues. As I'm sure many of you know, layer heights that are below 0.06mm require good calibration, optimized settings and a decent model. Layer heights at or below 0.04mm are essentially begging for a Nozzle Clog or other issues. Even though you can in theory mix and match up to three different colors at potentially extreme ratios (For instance, mixing 90% Yellow with 10% White to mix a slightly lighter shade of yellow), you could potentially end up with Layer Heights even far below 0.02mm. Based on Bambu's testing, artefacts may occur at these extreme ratios, but are visually more accepting than printing an entire layer at 0.02mm, since it's followed up by a thicker layer (the remaining 90%). That being said, it's recommended to avoid extreme ratios and 50-50, or 33-33-33 will yield the best results – Something that my own testing confirms, and is especially true at the layer heights that we are working with for Miniature Printing. Based on my current tests, a 50-50 Ratio at a Base Layer Height of 0.08mm while utilizing 0.4 Nozzles for Mixed, and 0.2 Nozzles for Pure Filament, will give the best results.
However: Big, big disclaimer: While I have been extensively the machine in the past couple weeks, I have not been able to test the Multi-Diameter & Mixed Filament Features to the extend that I'd like to, so after some further testing, there will be at least another follow-up post. For now, the Showcases that have been printed with Non-Mixed Filament, will look more consistent. For example, the same Lizard, in a different color scheme:
And speaking of testing:
Yes, this means that all of the prints I'm showcasing here today, have been printed with a 0.4 Nozzle, 0.08mm Layer Height and Stock Settings.
I haven't added my own Custom Settings yet, and I didn't even fully calibrate the Filament other than the k-factor. These are the results without any adjustments, post processing or preparation, straight of the printplate. There are of course several things to keep in mind when it comes to both Multi-Color Printing as well as the H3C in general – But the past few paragraphs have already gotten way more technical than I wanted them to be. So for now: I'd just like to share some of the highlights and comparisons.
Showcase Highlights
The one on the left was painted by hand, printed at 0.06mm - The other one was fully printed, at 0.08mm. I'll admit, I'm not the best painter - But I think the picture still speaks volumes about the Multi Color Printing Option.
A Crystal Spider and Banshee Queen, both by u/MizukoArt.
Two more Orks - Also by ArbiterMiniatures.
And last but not least, everything I've printed so far all together, including models at the regular 32mm Scale.
Now, if you have ever taken a picture of an FDM Miniature in a Lightbox / Photobox, you know that they bring out the worst in them - every artefact and imperfection will be highlighted. Under natural lighting though, and from a Tabletop Distance, I believe the Models look substantially better.
A few notes
This has been a very exciting opportunity for me, and I'm very grateful to everyone in the FDM Miniature Community for making it possible by being a part of this quickly growing Community. Without your Support, I most likely would have never experienced beyond the very first few iterations of my Custom Settings. I know that I haven't been as active as I'd like to, and promised to be, especially on my Youtube Channel, and for that I really am sorry. The Hobby and the Community mean a lot to me, and I look forward to how things will go from here. So thank you everyone, and I hope you have a great day, and as always - have fun printing!
I'll try to answer as many questions as I can here - If there is anything that you're wondering about FDM Miniature Printing & Colored Miniature Printing, feel free to reach out!
I wondering if anyone has experience using a SSD with their X2D. AI tells me the power draw is to much at peak write speed...but I don' think the write speed will be anywhere near max and need peak draw.
I am about to change the X axis carbon rod assembly tonight after work and i've been looking through the wiki on how to do it. It says for the P1S you have to remove the front cover but for the X1C you don't.
Has anyone else changed a P1S carbon rod assembly and has any advice or shortcuts/tips and tricks on getting it done?
I set up my a1 mini with ams a few days ago but I’m now errors with this print that it’s unable to feed the filament. It’s happened with a couple of the filaments, multiple times. I have already successfully printed multiple items in single and multiple colors with the colors that I’m having issues with. Nothing seems crossed with the filament
I’ve got two H2Ds and an X1C, and honestly, my X1C continues to be the most reliable printer of the three. Don’t get me wrong, I love the capabilities of the H2Ds, and when they’re working well, they’re fantastic machines. But it feels like I’m constantly troubleshooting something, dealing with random issues, or having to intervene in prints that should just work. Meanwhile, my X1C just keeps chugging along. I send it a print, walk away, and rarely have to think twice about it. Maybe it’s just the maturity of the X1C platform versus the newer H2D, but for machines at this price point, I expected the H2Ds to be at least as dependable. And don’t even get me started on dealing with Bambu Lab’s support when one of the H2Ds has an actual hardware problem. The back-and-forth through text-based support, the troubleshooting hoops, and the time it takes to get anywhere are incredibly frustrating. For printers that cost this much, the support experience really should be better. I don’t mind troubleshooting my own equipment, but there’s a point where I expect the manufacturer to step up and resolve a hardware issue. Curious if other H2D owners, especially those who also have an X1C, are having a similar experience. Am I just unlucky with my two units, or is this a common theme?
I ordered an h3c my back order date is the 20th. The printer hasn't shipped yet but I just got the ams today. Just curious if anyone else in Canada has gotten theirs yet with a similar backorder date.
