After 4 months of usage with about 100 prints this has happened today. Could anyone point me to a guide how to took everything apart and clean it?
Thanks in advance!
p.s.
I’ve created a ticket, but so far for my other tickets response time has been 1-2 weeks.
If you can still heat the hotend…heat the nozzle only to 250-260*.
After about 10 min. start pulling off the filament with a pair of tweezers.
Try to remove as much as possible, including the sock.
When you get to the nozzle clips, unhook them & remove the nozzle.
From there, use a heat gun to finish cleanup…be careful not to melt the fan or any other plastic parts.
I just had this happen to mine. How did your cleanup go?
I have used a soldering iron. Also activated maintenance mode in the printer and heated nozzle to 300C. Took about 2 hours. Had to replace two fans and the heating element. Took another two hours. Taking the printer apart and back together is no fun.
How did the ticket go, did they get back to you?
They did and gave just some general tips . Also suggested to turn on the automatic nozzle clumping detection, which is off by default. But I’ve turned it on already before that tragic print, and the detection didn’t work at all.
As a general tip from me: Use a printer glue spray for every single print, even PLA prints! The clumping has happened twice, but since I’ve started using the spray every single time, it did not happen again (100+ prints). Before I have used the glue spray only for PETG. After the drama using it also for PLA.
boogers happen
as an adjunct to the process, I would add the use a product called nozzle coat
Why happen this primble?
I have this problem back to back
Please i need help
I have a new A1 (less than one month old) and I have the same problem. I cleaned the sock but the retaining brackets on the heating assembly are coated in filament as is the hotend. I’m a newbie. Would the heat gun and/or soldering iron be used to melt the filament off of the parts?
Will it melt it off of the retaining clips?
Does it make sense to try to clean the clips in the assembly or should I try to remove it and clean it?
With the plastic cooling fan below the nozzle, don’t use a heat gun or you’ll end up buying a new fan also.
A soldering iron will work, but you can put the printer in Maintenance Mode & use a set of tweezers to pull away the filament.
Settings/Maintenance/Maintenance Mode
It will turn off in about 1-5 20 min, so you might need to turn it back on a few times.
In most cases when this happens you will need some replacement parts. mostly the heating element, nozzle and one or both fans. and hours of work. it’s simply not possible to clean everything 100%, and your printer will not print as good as before.
The same thing happened to me last night with my A1.
I was running a print job to create 52 seperate Rummikub tiles using 4 PLA colors via the AMS Lite, on a brand-new Smooth PEI Plate.
At some point during the print, it seems like one of the pieces detached from the plate, pulling others with it. While that’s bad enough, the bigger issue was that the printer didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong. It continued as if everything was fine, swapping filaments and extruding - but instead of going onto the plate, the filament was fed directly into the toolhead.
When I came to check the print, I found the entire toolhead encased in hardened filament. Cleaning this up was a nightmare. I had to completely dismantle the toolhead, use a soldering heat gun and carefully remove the mess. Sadly, the damage was significant, and several parts are now unusable:
which, together with the shipping costs, adds up to nearly a hefty 50 €.
How can it be that the printer does not recognise THAT?
Yes, the clumb detection is just horrible. Didn’t work in my case either.
What I hate most about Bambu Lab printers is how difficult it is to repair them. Why do I need to remove the freaking board and several cables just to replace the heating element? Every simple repair takes an hour, because you need to be extremely careful. Many cables and sensors are very fragile. They can break very easily. With a better design a heating element swap could be possible in 2 minutes.
Just as a reminder to everyone. ALWAYS use glue spray when printing, even with PLA. Since using glue spray generouse the clumping problem didn’t happened to me again (200+ prints).
Bambu Lab seems to be aware of the problem. They have even set up a dedicated info page for it. But the solution is to reorder the defective parts. I think a technical solution would be better to prevent the problem from occurring in the first place. It should actually be possible to detect it somehow using sensors or optically via the camera. I hope that there will soon be a software update that makes such detection possible.
https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/a1-mini/maintenance/hotend_blob
can somebody explain why does this happen, because it happened on my A1 too
Usually the main cause of this is poor bed adhesion due to the the build plate needing a good cleaning. The filament won’t stick to the bed but instead curls up and just snowballs from there. This is definitely not a Bambu specific problem. If you Google “blob of death” and select “images” you can see horrific photos of every brand and model of printer in existence.
That´s scary! Does that only happen when you do not watch the first layers or can that happen later in the print as well?
The most common cause of a “blob” is the model letting go from the build plate in the first layer(s) and it getting dragged around with the printhead. The filament has nowhere to go and is forced up and around the nozzle. This isn’t something that happens quickly, it would take an multiple hours to extrude the filament you see in some of the really bad blob pictures. Prints that let go from the plate after the first few layers generally don’t get dragged around with the head and thus produce spaghetti instead.
To avoid something happening like this is what I suggest.
It can happen at any layer. Usually doesn’t happen within the first layers, as they do stick better if the object has less mass.
In the picture that started this thread the problem has happened after more than 3 of 6 hours of printing. The last time I’ve checked the print was at 50%, and then went to bed.
If there is a bad adhesion and a critical mass is reached the object may move, especially if the the bottom Z distance is very low and the tip of the hotend scratches the object.
Mostly nothing bad will happen, as the print will continue in the air. But sometimes the object will fall into the hotend and the filament will get to the hotend surface.
This can happen with every printer, so it’s not a specific Bambu Labs issue.
I’m mad at Bambu Labs for 2 things:
