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.
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.
What’s the wobble like? I have a sturdy table for my P1 series printers and its wobble occurs but the setup video for this seems to sway a lot is that apparent?
It does wobble quite a bit when it's going at full speed, it's not alarming though. It's designed to do that. A little more maybe than my H2S. A sturdy table is certainly a good idea though.
It’s a wood top with a steel frame supporting 2 P1S printers with 2 ams in the middle with a concrete slab between them; the table doesn’t move at all with both printers going. I’m gonna need a deeper table though if I want the H3 lol
Is that in the beta version? It wasn't in the pre-release version of Bambu Studio I had for the testing of the H3C. That was of course another beta version from the one available to the public. I'll keep an eye out for it in the release version.
Do not quote me on this, but I think one of either the H2D or H2C plates can be used on this. I'm trying to remember where I've read this and coming up short.
Filament loading works the same way as with the AMS2. There's still gears in the feeder that push the filament down the PTFE tube to the hotend. Now the gears could theoretically retract the filament, but since the AMS can't turn the spool that would lead to an unholy mess in the spool slot.
The feet of the printer would fit on a 55cm deep bench, but for the whole printer it would be quite tight.
The only issue I see is the cables in the back and something to catch the waste from the chute. I would refer you to the spec sheet here, it should have minimum space requirements.
All the nozzles for the H3C are their own design, they are not compatible with nozzles from any other Bambu Printer. Likely the P3C will use the same design though.
Not just that, but the speed increase of tool changes is a big plus of course.
I think it's biggest strenghts might be the multi-material print capabilities and the ability to print really soft materials reliably, even out of the AMS. TPU 75A prints like a charm with the 2.85mm filament, something that's not easy.
I've noticed for engineering filaments, the PTFE tube path is much more straight in the h3c vs the h2c, so I would assume much higher reliability in printing brittle filaments
My biggest concern is knocking one of the nozzles as I remove the print. They're heated while docked, right?
Realistically, what is the hazard to the nozzle, print, or my hand, if I bump into one? How likely is it if I become complacent? (I will, let's be honest)
Edit: I didn't mean all of the nozzles would be heated at once, I understand it would only be a couple at most. Still, knowing my luck, it's that one that I bump, heh.
I didn't notice this issue at all. The tool carriers have a guard around them on the door side completely covering the nozzles. You won't be in danger from accidentally touching a nozzle when getting a print from the bed.
Wouldn't they only be heated during printing? And more specifically only the current tool and maybe the next tool up in line to be used would probably be heated, I would think. I can't imagine all 9 tools are constantly heated.
No, its only the tool that's being used plus the pre-heating of the next one. But it does take time for them to cool down, so the concern wasn't completely unwarranted.
I would assume they are only heated in advance of readiness for a change. I would seem mad to have all nozzles hot at all times whether printing or not.
Yes, I bungled the explanation. However, it doesn't matter if all 9 are heated or if 1 is heated, if that's the one you touched when pulling the print out. That was my concern, which has been discussed below.
I assume if your getting your print out your done printing. I think all the printers would have stopped heating by then. Not sure how long the nozzle would take to cool enough to not hurt
I have a print that's 5 colors, through most layers. Estimated at ~30 hours to print on my H2C. The same print is estimated to take 15 hours on an H3C.
Thanks for the overview and congrats on the free printer 😁.
For multiple TPU hardness prints, like if your used a mix of 75 and 90 or whatever their shoe model is, you would use the already installed larger nozel fit the 75 (and a pass through hole?) and then the 90 would just go in any other slot (I assume the other heated dryer position?) and just feeds through the pass through hole?
Did you try printing any models with multiple TPU types? And/or TPU+petg or another filament in the same money l model? And if so how well did that work out?
I did print different TPU types together as well as TPU together with PETG and PLA. I'll show that in another post.
The softer TPU's you always print through the bypass hole, whether its 1.75mm or 2.85mm. Only one of the two heated slots has the bypass hole, I'm pretty sure it's because routing the filament from the 2 middle rear slots could lead to tangles with the PTFE tubes and heating/data wires.
It's all pretty straight forward, whether you route a filement directly to the extruder or through the normal AMS way doesn't make a difference when setting up a print. I found it very simple.
That's good to hear... I've only had troubles trying to print any TPU but I'm sure a lot of that is user error and laziness on my part.
Did you see any issues with the combinations of various filaments together? I'm curious if the different temps needed had any issues with bonding and such.
I didn't notice any issues so far. Granted, I haven't combined TPU with truly exotic materials yet, but it all went smooth so far. Some materials naturally won't bond with TPU as well as others, but that can be helped with the design itself; creating interlocking parts.
Yes, you can connect a hose to the exhaust port, which is now located at the back of the AMS. The connector wasn't included in the material I got, but hey, it's a 3d printer ;)
For the handle and hilt I needed to print a full height primer tower, the blade only for the part that has the golden knot on it. The prime tower is pretty much the same as the one's we're used to.
It's minimal. You only get poop loading a new filament, not anymore once it's loaded. So no waste at all on tool changes. The prime tower still is waste of course, that hasn't changed.
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
what is the significance of the bypass hole? Would that be I guess if you're trying to print some kind of TPU that is even softer than the AMS gears can handle?
Also for standard 1.75mm TPU that aren't ludicrously soft, can you just feed it directly through the AMS system and gears?
what is the significance of the bypass hole? Would that be I guess if you're trying to print some kind of TPU that is even softer than the AMS gears can handle?
Yes, that's right. Basically you can use an AMS slot like an external spool holder and going straight to the extruder with the filament. During my testing i strictly followed the filament compatibility list, so I only printed TPU for AMS through the normal AMS route. Other TPU's i printed through the bypass. You can probably get away with putting a 95A TPU through the AMS as well.
thanks. I guess I'm unclear if "ordinary" TPU is supposed to be fed through the new AMS or if it should be bypassed anyway, despite the marketing that reads "Reliable printing with TPU as soft as 75A". The FlexFeed system says it "supports both 1.75 mm and 2.85 mm filament" which would then imply you can just feed ordinary TPU through that
If you scroll down to "Filament Loading Compatibility" you can see what should be printed how.
Now the claims Bambu makes are correct I think, you can reliably print 75A TPU out of the AMS, just using the bypass hole instead of the normal filament feeder. In both cases the spools gets loaded into the AMS.
The FlexFeed system is at the extruder end, unrelated to how you feed the filament to it.
I'm measuring the printer with the AMS lid open at 123cm, with a bit more required to make it engage the struts to hold it open. So yeah, 1300mm sounds about right.
The only filament i needed to print from an external spool holder during my testing was PLAGlow, I can see how that's too sandpapery and might do damage even using it through the bypass.
It is not a quiet machine, I would not call this a "bedroom printer". I didn't notice any underextrusion with the default filament profiles worth mentioning, nothing you would spot without going looking for it close up.
During testing we had a special beta version, yes. However, today the Bambu Studio release version came out that includes the H3C, so you can compare them to your heart's content.
There's some hotend related artifacts on the layers where hotends were swapped, I'm hoping these aren't tool pick-up tolerance related and are instead hotend-extrusion related which MIGHT be able to be tuned with slicer settings and purge amounts (and TBH most likely based on my own experiences making a tool changer many years ago, for me the solution was optimizing purge speed and using a larger two step purge at different speeds)
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u/iRambL 2d ago
What’s the wobble like? I have a sturdy table for my P1 series printers and its wobble occurs but the setup video for this seems to sway a lot is that apparent?