Just over a month now printing with my A1 mini with the AMS. It has been bliss, this little printer just works, the AMS is reliable and works well. No Jams at all.
My P1P is just reached 12 months of service, I have updated it with the P1S upgrade kit. The X1C with 2 x AMS units has been in my print pool for the last 6 months. The P1S would not print anything at all when I received it ubtill I found the right front bed linear bearing was rusted and sticking to the rod. Due to me being in South Africa, it would of cost more to return the machine than buying a bearing and repairing it myself. Since then I have had no issues. My X1C after 1 week stopped printing and I had may errors showing up on the screen. This machine was purchased from a local supplier, so to retain the warrantee I returned the machine to them, a month later it came back with a new Lidar and print head PCB. I have had no issues since then. The P1P and the X1C print well with very few issue, the AMS unit however is a different story. One feed has been placed due to the motor not turning. The filament sensors are very flimsy and give trouble after time, need cleaning and in my case the replacement of one sensor. The PTFE tubes on the AMS get worn quickly using only PLA for the past 6 months. Continuous filament sticking when filament retracts with no blockages or obvious problems. 20 feeds from one filament roll on a multi colour print will feed fine then suddenly filament gets stuck and will not feed to the nozzle. This may be due to the PTFE tubes binding. The P1 and X1 AMS units are not reliable.
The A1 Mini with AMS has had no issues from startup to date. This may be a old fashion bed slinger, however BL appeared to do their homework with this machine. The print head with the easy swap nozzle is brilliant and the tech built in to sense the filament flow one would expect this ease of use on the flagship machines.
In closing the my BL experience has been great and overall the printers are really a mile ahead of the other consumer printer manufacturers. BL make a mod for the P1 and X1 series to utilize the A1 print head and AMS.
Wow that is a great path you have walked.
I did find my X1C very user friendly and no major issues (other than user-errors :)) It is a machine that I respect and try to care for. I have like 300 hours so I haven’t used it much. I have to mention I got my machine like 6 months after release date and they fixed a lot of things. My bro got a new X1 a month ago and it seems that they are still changing thing and make the experience better and better. Which I like a lot and almost nobody can really see as an ordinary user.
In general I use the A1 since I got it. I think the good quality is because it is quite overbuild and just done right. It is quite heavy for it’s size and everything is made with strong parts. Thus this makes printing fast.
People say it is faster than X1 but it is not. At least according slicer P1 and X1 are quite faster if the print is a few hours or more.
But I just click print and leave it to do whatever it wants to do. But man that flow calibration is just killing me. It is soooo goood. As in X1C especially for multi-color it was a pain, now it is working so nice. For a local PLA I needed to calibrate one of my other printers for like a week, dryed the material, 200gr of calibrating models and so on. Meanwhile the A1 was printing PERFECT prints each and every time with the same roll no matter what
So I got Purple Sparkle PLA from bambu and tested it on the X1C. I printed the Benchy that is included in the printer. Was it 17min one? I think yes. It is pretty good. Then I dry the fillament and few days later I printed Benchy on the A1. Not the speed boat but the 19min one. FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE I see a Benchy without any Ghosting. NONE. ZERO. The X1C even has some but here it is just… PUURRRRfect
As the X1C is not close by me I am thinking of printing the same model with same filament on both machines. I need to know if the A1 has really better quality than the X1C. I think the X1C is still levels ahead of the other printers (even P1 printers are nothing much as they do not have self flow calibrations) but this one… Blew my mind in order of quality.
How many hours do you have on your machines? I still haven’t find out where I can check this for my A1 hmmm…
I’m happy to read this. This is encouraging because i received mine at Christmas and it doesn’t work. It won’t turn on and support is really slow to answer.
