I just got my A1 (without AMS lite) a little over a week ago, I’ve put around 115 hours on it. Most printed turned out great, very happy with the results. I was doing a print of a battery holder and went to check on it. It had been air printing for a while, the nozzle was about 2 inches over the top part of the holder with nothing coming out. I’ve torn the entire machine down as detailed in the trouble shooting page on the wiki site, filament spool spins fine, checked external feeding, took apart and cleaned the filament hub, took apart and cleaned the extruder unit, unclogged the hotend using both cold pull and heating/needle cleaning. If I reload filament, it will load and it will poop filament, but it won’t print. So it extrudes when loading but not when printing. I ordered a new hotend that should get here today, any other ideas? I put in a trouble ticket but I’ve heard it can take a while for Bambu to get back and I’d like to be up and running again ASAP. Thanks!
What kind of filament? Dried in a dryer or just out of the box?
Just out of the vacuum sealed plastic in the box. I had already printed about a third of it. I noticed that when I removed the hotend and pushed the extrude button on the screen, the yellow pinwheel turns but no filament is advanced through the hole where the hotend nozzle was. I’m thinking this might be a problem with the extruder not gripping the filament and pushing it forward.
“Out of the Vacuum Bag” is Not dry. Filaments May be dry in this BAG but Most of the time are Not. Always dry before use.
A dry/then back to room humidity cycle can stress the filament and make it a bit more brittle each time. Unless it’s Nylon or some other specialty filament, drying directly out of the sealed bag is usually not necessary.
If it regularly stops extruding after a while there might be a filament tangle (knot) on the spool, this can happen when the end of the filament has been let go at some point (it needs to be threaded through the 2 little holes always when the spool is not in use). There’s some methods how to remove these tangles if this is what happened
Thanks for all your replies. I bought a dryer and that seemed to help quite a bit. I had another episode so I cleaned everything again and did a 4 hour drying cycle in my Sunlo dryer. Worked fine after that. I’ll try to limit it to one time per spool so I don’t stress it as mentioned above and store it in a vacuum sealed bag with desiccant. Typically I’ve been using up the spools pretty quick so I don’t think more than one cycle would ever be necessary.