Hello, I saw that the PLA-CF requires a hardened steel nozzle which I will buy but is the extruder gear also required to be hardened steel or is it okay for it to just use the stock one? Thanks.
Yes and no. Steel is not as soft as the brass nozzles and the nozzle and the gears won’t wear out that fast.
If you only rarely print CF, you don’t have to change anything. Not the gears and not the nozzle.
But if you print lots of CF you should at least get a hardened nozzle - 0.6 would be even better. Getting the hardened gears would not hurt either.
However: My strategy would be to keep everything as is and wait for both to wear out - but already buy the hardened gears and nozzle (or nozzles) - which I also did.
Once you switched over to hardened steel nozzle and gears, you will probably keep it for everything else as well - basically the default setup of the X1C.
I bought the P1P set of hardened replacement parts last week, just updated them so I am ready if I need to do a stronger filament
Something to note is the P1P and X1C extruder housings are the same.
The difference is the X1C and P1P have different extruder control board connectors.
The X1C has hardened gears stock, the P1P has stainless steel.
You can therefore purchase the X1C standard extruder unit with the hardened steel gears and just swap out the board for the one on your P1P (2 screws).
Saves having to purchase the hardenened gears and pull apart the extruder housing to swap them with the bearing.
It was really easy to swap the parts in mine, I did all the jobs in an hour, hardened steel hotend and hardened steel extruder gear, heavy duty toolhead cable, cable chain and the aux part cooling fan.
They are not hard to do if you watch the videos on the Bambu Labs Wiki, each packet has a QR scan code for each video
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I also think it is easy enough to swap the gears only. The extruder housing is not likely to break, so there is no need to spend more than double and have an additional extruder which will possibly never be used again.
Well it was just for info. I’ve pulled mine apart 3 times to remove bits of stuck filament and find it easy too. But I’ve also seen people hesitant to want to pull apart the extruder and I’ve also seen at least 2 posts here where people have left off the bearing while changing over the gears.
I don’t know about PLA-CF but I just got some PETG-CF yesterday (first time ever) and I was surprised how stiff/hard and “rough” the filament was. I am sure glad I decided to upgrade to the hardened extruder gear + nozzle before using this stuff. Doing the upgrade for both didn’t take more than an hour and the videos are easy to follow.
Also, even though Bambu says PETG-CF is compatible with AMS, after seeing how hard the material is and how my AMS struggled a little bit to pull it, I feel better loading it without the AMS directly from a drying box (I am not sure how much beating those plastic AMS gears can take!).