Hello, my Bambu A1 has been working properly for about 7-8 months without any issues, with the necessary maintenance (lubrication, cleaning the bed, cleaning the nozzle, etc.). A few days ago, a print failed and I wasn’t paying attention; it probably failed because it was quite thin and it bent at the corners. But that’s not the issue.
The issue is that when it failed, the nozzle got clogged and created a giant ball of melted plastic. I was able to stop the print and remove all the plastic, but during the process, one of the metal tabs/hinges holding the nozzle broke.
I bought a new hotend heating assembly, installed it, and now the printer is unable to print the first layer correctly. It’s a total mess. I’ve tried recalibrating the bed again (even though I have it set to do so before each print), I’ve tried tightening the screws of the hotend heating assembly, as well as the 4 small screws behind it, which I’ve read in several places could be a bit loose, but nothing works, it’s still the same.
I’ve tried doing a Flow Dynamics calibration, as well as a Flow Rate Calibration, but with no success. I can’t even finish the latter because the first layer is so bad that as soon as it tries to print the second layer, everything ends in disaster.
Edit: It Happens with every kind of pla, elegoo,winkle, amazon, sunlu…
Did you check the extruder? I had nozzle clogs on my X1 which caused the extruder to bunch up filament in the extruder.
One particularly memorable one caused the extruder to grind a groove into the filament, reducing the front filament diameter, blocking up the extruder teeth and… releasing PETG residue into the new nozzle trying to print PLA…
Not replaced, but tried with another one that i have and did the same, the cover and the sock are not on because if i dont keep an eye on the printer it can cause a bit of a disaster and that way i can see it better at the moment
I can’t start a new thread yet, so I’ll post in this one. It’s kinda on-topic anyway.
I would have labelled the new thread “The mysterious case of the meandering nozzle height”.
About two months ago - with zero changes to any settings and using files that have printed fine before and many times - the nozzle start to really rub hard onto the plate. Tried power cycling the A1, making sure there was nothing stuck under the plate, checking the hot end for rigidity, etc, and everything was fine.
Out of options, I started to raise the height of the nozzle by changing the gcode. The first successful print was at a height of + 0.28 mm which is a huge change over the standard PEI textured plate of - 0.02 mm.
Over the next few weeks I found that I had to gradually lower the nozzle height bit by bit to make sure the first layer stuck well enough. Lost a lot of prints the hard way because of that including some very expensive PPA-CF filament ones.
Anyway, over the last week or so it’s wandered back to the standard -0.02 mm and in the last few days seems to be stable there again now.
The attached picture shows how I had to make the varying nozzle heights, with the oldest being the bottom of the list and the newest at the top.
FWIW that’s the work A1, I have one here at home as well and it’s not needed any nozzle height fiddling, but a friend of mine also has one and he also is having problems with nozzle height & so a good first layer .
Any ideas what was going on please ???
Bet tramming woulda probably fixed it. The bed leveling that it does before the prints could have been faulty at the beginning and gradually get more accurate as you made more prints.
I don’t know if this helps or not but at about one year in my A1 started having problems. Turned out the problem was caused by those fine strings that one sometimers sees blowing in the wind about the nozzle sock. They had built up inside the extruder and although they were barely perceptible, once cleaned out, the printer worked perfectly again.
This, i started triying different offsets and with a 0.14 offset the first layer is flawless, i printed various tests and all perfect, i wish it doesnt get worse with time but at the moment, its fixed
I had a similar problem turned out it was the (3 I think) screws in behind the nozzle clasp had slightlu loosened off, apparently this is a common problem, try that and see if it helps
Theres 4 in behind the hot end, theees a wiki on the fix sorry its not letting me post pics here.
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