I love my X1 Carbon, but the process of swapping the hotend assembly—such as to go from 0.4mm to 0.2mm or 0.6mm depending on the needs of my print—is a bit tedious at best, and anxiety inducing at worse.
As a hobby user I find myself doing this fairly frequently, as the kind of prints I like to make vary from small detailed miniatures to larger structural parts.
So I’m not a big fan that each time I want to perform this operation I have to remove and re-tighten two screws and unplug and re-plug the 4-pin cooling fan plug and the tiny 2-pin thermistor plug, as shown on the wiki: Replacing the complete hotend assembly / Nozzle Replacement Guide | Bambu Lab Wiki
Even if I am careful, this results in wear on the screws, the mounting holes, and the wires and plugs. I’m primarily worried about the wires and plugs.
While I don’t currently have a need for the recently released Bambu A1, I love what I have seen of the Quick Swap nozzle it employs.
For my personal use-case this kind of a system would be perfect, being able to swap nozzles at any time without tools and without fear of wearing out the wires.
I understand that every design choice like this has tradeoffs and drawbacks. For example replacing the thermistor or fan on the A1 is far more tedious than on the X1, requiring quite a bit of disassembly A1 series Hotend Heating Assembly Replacement Guide | Bambu Lab Wiki
Similarly I don’t know how the thermal performance of the hotend is affected on the A1 vs the X1.
So my feature request for the X1—or potential new entries by Bambu in a similar or higher price and feature range—would be a quick swap hotend that is comparable in ease of use to that of the A1.
I am aware that some third party solutions exist, but I would love something just provided by Bambu that I know just works.
I would ideally love for this to just be an upgrade you can purchase from the Bambu store for existing X1 printers.