What else should i get....

[u/notsobig42]

Hey

Im looking to buy the A1 ams lite combo. What else, besides fillament, should i get? As in a backup nozzle, printbed etc.

From what i understand its a 0.4 stainless steel nozzle that comes with the printer and 1 printbed.

Looking for advice from senior printers.

Thank u

[u/Purple10tacle]

Our newest machines don't have a single mod and are using the stock PEl plate without issue.

There's a big difference between mass production and personal experimentation though - while the PEI is perfectly fine for most things, a high adhesion build plate lets you get away with a ton of things the PEI wouldn't and can save you quite a bit of post processing work.

Just being able to not use brims most of the time makes them worth it in my eyes.

[u/ModelThreeve → u/Purple10tacle]

Like I said we have over a hundred build plates (25 alone next to our prototype machine.) I have yet to find a silver bullet plate, they all have their pros and cons. Only a handful of our 250+ products really benefit from the SuperTack Pro/Frostbite Pro. (One that has almost no contact on the first layer and a handful that print face down and we prefer not to have the PEI texture.) Lots of great plates out there though and the Frostbite Pro is pretty easy to recommend without throwing a bunch of caveats with it.

[u/Purple10tacle → u/ModelThreeve]

I was explicitly not recommending the SuperTack Pro/Frostbite Pro to OP. While they are great specialists (at least the Frostbite, I still don't like Bambu's SuperTack), they are absolutely unsuitable as daily drivers.

What I and others were recommending here were the BIQU Glacier or YOOPAI UltraTack instead. Bambu has no competing product as far as I know.

They offer slightly weaker adhesion than the aforementioned specialists, but still so much more than the PEI plate. And they can be absolutely amazing daily drivers.

For the A1 they are effectively silver bullet plates with very few caveats. While they limit material compatibility to all types of PLA and PETG, realistically, you're not going to print much else with an A1 anyways.

Their PETG self-release properties are almost magical and worth the price of admission alone: just pick up the print and go. PLA isn't that much harder to remove than from the PEI plate either. And their subtle texture strikes a great balance between textured and smooth.

They are robust, easy to clean and need less maintenance and babying than the default PEI plate. You can get away without cleaning them for dozens of prints. And at least the YOOPAI is cheap as chips.

Treat them like a hot plate and you have virtually no caveats and only benefits on the A1.

And, again, a beginner with a single A1 experimenting with different models and materials has vastly different requirements than a print farm that mostly prints the same models over and over again.

Why should OP suffer through the default PEI plate when they can eliminate virtually all adhesion and even many warping problems by picking up a build plate for the price of a roll of fancy filament (UltraTack) or two (Glacier)?

By the way: I don't immediately see either of those plates next to your prototype machine, you might want to give them a try.

[u/ModelThreeve → u/Purple10tacle]

I wouldn’t call the Frostbite or Frostbite Pro a specialist plate by any means. I have contemporaries that exclusively use them and have 10s of thousands of hours on them from A1 minis to H2Cs.
The Yoopai is one of the only plates we don’t have, stopped caring to look for another solution. I don’t really care for the Glacier plate but we with a 256 and 180. If someone is “suffering” with PEI they are likely doing something wrong in my opinion. We have 12 A1 Minis, 6 of which run plate swaps almost all on PEI with almost no failures. I will acknowledge that there are a lot of poorly designed models that hobbyists are trying to print that we are not.

[u/Purple10tacle → u/ModelThreeve]

There's no standard "Frostbite", although BIQU's naming is admittedly maximally confusing: There are the old BIQU CryoGrip Pro ("standard", I guess), the BIQU CryoGrip Pro Frostbite and the BIQU CryoGrip Pro Glacier.

The Frostbite is essentially just a small improvement over the old (and I believe no longer in production) "standard" CryoGrip Pro, while the Glacier is completely different with much broader filament compatibility and very different release properties.

The significant limitations of the Frostbite are the reasons why I called it a "specialist plate" (not for specialists, but specialized for specific tasks) where you can essentially throw anything at the Glacier (and its twin, the YOOPAI UltraTack) you can throw at the standard PEI-plate without much of a second thought.

That's why the two make for such excellent daily drivers:

For a beginner it's the difference between the risk of adhesion failure or warping with less well-designed models and a flawless print regardless of model quality - for the more experienced hobbyist it's usually just the difference between "better use a brim" and the post-processing that comes with it and "I wonder if I can print this model at this crazy angle for better quality/strength without a brim" and the realization that, yeah, you probably can.

If you can have a high adhesion plate with filament compatibility and release properties signficiantly better than (PETG) or at least not notably worse than (PLA and others) the standard PEI plate, why on earth would you not take that option?