I got a filament dryer recently and want to print with the filament still inside it’s enclosure, can I feed it through the AMS without it being on the spool holder?
Edit: this is the AMS lite
Nope and don’t see a point in trying.
That’s what the external spool holder is for - you disconnect the feed tube and feed from your dryer.
Without a spool and the feedback from it the AMS won’t work, not even if you manage to get your filament in the feeder.
For that the lid would have to be open or you need a hole, hence me seeing no point.
Ah okay, shame. There is a hole in it to use it as a dry box already plus the rollers but yeah I did assume the AMS needed more than the filament just being in the feed mechanism, just wanted to check for the sake of practicality. Thanks though
Yes, you absolutely can and I do it with both my AMS lite, and AMS ‘regular’.
It cannot retract at the start/end of prints, and may need some manual help for that, but otherwise I do this quite frequently when I can’t be bothered to respool or tape up my cardboard spools. So it can’t be done for multicolor prints, but if it’s a single roll, go for it.
You can also disconnect one of the bowden tubes from the AMS lite, and set the printer to external spool, then easily feed in the filament from the dryer via that tube.
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It doesn’t. Apart from the feeders and the RFID reader the AMS is quite passive. The spool holders do have some spring tension to roll the filament back on retract, so you need some other way to take up the slack. If you have a PTFE between your dryer and the feeder that just bumps against the feeder when pulling filament, it will get pushed away from the feeder on retraction creating a buffer from exposed filament.
I have not done this myself but I am pretty sure this is doable and you will have a piece of the filament expose (not sure how much of a problem this will be). This is more or less how Prusa’s MMU takes up slack from retraction.
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Is that a new thing or did I miss something here?
Shortly after I got my printer I wanted to use a roll of special effect filament but it was too big to fit in the AMS - too wide to be precise.
Did the logical thing and placed it on the wall mount to go into the AMS with the lid open.
Managed to get the print started eventually using an empty spool first and then some more desperate things.
But it all kept failing when the AMS tried to change filament or retract a lot.
If this actually works it would be quite nice for certain rolls…
Now I have to try this out one day LOL
Thanks anyway, happy to learn some things do change for the better.
Cool, thank you! I’ll have to try it
It will fail to retract or change filaments, but if it’s a one filament job this can work.
It gets me out of a bind occasionally with tangled or tightly wound filament that isn’t feeding well from the AMS.
Yup, as long as it’s not something that will constantly attempt to calibrate and retract (looking at you, PLA Wood) this is a good method
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Totally stupid mind game…
With the AMS we already have a system sorting 4 rolls for us.
And we add another AMS if we wanted to, even a bunch of them.
Couldn’t Bambu just allow us to use the same spliteer/joiner used to combine multiple AMS boxes to also let us feed in directly into the port instead of an AMS ???
A bit like this:
Add the splitter as usual but define it as an input for an external spool rather than being for another AMS.
Ideally provide a way to add a pause when the external roll has to be ready so, if required, the user can manually feed it back into the splitter and from there to the extruder.
Just saying…
I just printed straight from the dryer and it went like a dream! No issues at all, only problem was rolling it back but ah that’s a problem for next-time-I-use-it me.
I’m probably going to have to keep doing that since it kept the end result clean and string free for something so tiny (dummy 13 frame)
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Hmmm…
So it sort of works for you…
The AMS wants a spool to deal with things, so why not just give it a dummy spool ?
Put one into the slot you use to feed from an external spool.
Then just add a long rubber band that tensions once the spool rewinds.
Should give the darn thing the feedback the filament is rolled back up.
That is of course if this feedback is taken from the spool motor and not the feeder motor.
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