I feel your frustration, I have similar problems and what makes it more curious is that I have not one, but two X1E’s and they both mimic the exact same top layer issues which tells me it isn’t just a faulty printer
I come from running Prusas for the last decade and my experience with the X1E has been…underwhelming at best and downright frustrating at worst. For the record I’ve been printing for 10 years and I have more than enough experience tweaking advanced settings on prints and I can’t for the life of me get these X1E’s to print good top surface finishes.
I’ve tried everything: Dry filament, calibration, factory reset, specific setting and flow tweaks, manual Gcode tweaks, physically cleaning and rebuilding the hot end and feeder, replacing parts with newly purchased ones. No luck, no luck at all. I just go back to my Prusa and get perfect prints with no BS. No calibrating, no resetting, no tweaking, no Z offset or layer adjustments, none of that.
I can’t tell if it’s bad equipment or just maybe that Bambu is a young company and their print profiles/firmware is just not as well engineered as Prusas, but I’m just about over this issue as it should be a relatively simple fix, but it just apparently isn’t with these X1E’s. Pretty disappointed considering this is a premium priced machine.
So as a precursor, I’ve come a long way as I’ve been troubleshooting. At first I was having similar quality to OP and I’ve now managed to get it to where the attached photos are. I’ve attached a silk filament print because it’s more clear to see, but the issue happens on all filaments, which includes even Bambu brand with stock profiles. I’ve also attached a print with Bambu Basic PLA to show where the struggles are. The edges seem better with slight overextrusion but away from the edges it’s always seemingly underextruded, with gaps.
While it is “good”, it is still far from perfect. I really hope to try to mimic the finish I get from my Prusa and I feel like it’s possible, but it’s becoming exhaustive.
For the record, the Silk is a custom profile I made, but the green is the standard 0.15mm Quality profile.
Apologies for bad focus on some parts, it’s hard to focus multiple small parts for a good shot. Thanks in advance for the help.
Hey everyone! I’ve been struggling with the same issue on one of my machines for quite some time. Tried many things including resetting firmware, changing extruder and motor, cleaning and calibrating everything again and again. But at the end of it, changing a XY-belt for a new one helped. Had my X1 for a year with good results and started having top layer defects just like on your photos, after changing belts all perfect again. Hope this helps.
Weird, it looks like one rectilinear top shell layer, or just one layer on top of infill, but I guess severe under/over extrusion might look like this. How many top shell layers is it for the NFL and the green item?
I think you have to go straight for the filament calibration in bambu studio or other and show us that flow rate calibration sheet, i guess they are all trash for the first pass and you can see though them? I did it recently just to really dial things in and I definitely noticed some of the higher flow cases had that checkerboard look on top.
Lenyo, this is why I’m so perplexed, as this print has 4 top layers. The NFL logo I believe we even tried 6 top layers.
I’ve tried every calibration under the sun, both automatic and manual. I even switched to Orcaslicer to try some of the extended calibrations as well.
When doing the manual calibration like your photo above, I found that 0 was the best result for both stages of the calibration. I even redid it to select 5 and then -5 as well to see if I noticed any changes, but did not.
Oddly enough, I replaced one of the nozzles with a 0.6 and the first layer was MUCH nicer, top layer was better as well but some of the remnants of this issue did persist. I just assume that the wider extrusion sort of alleviated the problem.
I have some new 0.4 nozzles coming in today and I’m going to re-run all the calibrations upon the new install and see what I end up with. It has been frustrating.
I’m curious as to why these machines are so finnicky with calibrations as well. Both my Prusa MK3 and 4’s never have to do flow calibrations to achieve good print results, so I’m just curious, is there some sort of design or engineering difference in Bambu that makes this necessary? It just seems like so much work to get things flowing correctly, when I’m used to never having to bother with all these steps.
I’m about to visit my dealer and probably return the printer. It’s not what sponsored reviews say about X1C. I’m having serious problems with stringing, even with dried Bambu Lab filaments. There are many other bugs and glitches as well (Bambu Studio, printer FW, Bambu Handy). It seems Bambu engineers don’t fix bugs.
How are you drying? Brand new spools out of the box/bag can have too much moisture for good printing and unfortunately there are limitations with most commercial filament dryers because of ambient humidity. Stringing is a common sign of moisture. More people have filament moisture issues than probably any other issue.
I use original Bambu Lab utility which is included is X1C’s firmware. I follow all steps the utility tells me to do. Drying time is 12 hours for PLA made by Bambu Lab.
I tried Z hop and retraction. It helped a lot. I mean A LOT! But it slowed down the printing.
Though I have returned the X1C to the dealer due to many other issues, like spaghetti, Z axis movement, very poor print quality compared to Prusa, …
Wait… why we have over/under extrusion problems when we have flow rate calibration? IMHO, after flow rate calibration Bambu printers should print only top quality prints with no tuning whatsoever.
That’s actually my experience. I haven’t touched any of the filament parameters other than the self calibration stuff. All my filament profiles are stock. And I get great prints.
I really do think the reason is my filaments actually are pretty dry - dryer than they need to be for good prints.
Drying on the heated printer bed helps but it is subject to limitations from ambient humidity just like th standard filament dryers are. Because of that they can be of limited effectiveness if humidity is moderate to high. It’s no different than how sweat doesn’t evaporate or why clothes take longer to dry on humid days.
