It seems I’m swapping hotends a little more often than I expected. How concerning is wear and tear from doing that? Both on the printer head itself and the plugs…
I guess the plugs in particular seem like they might wear out and start breaking. I usually have to pull at least a little on the wires to get the plugs out. Has anyone ever had these break or had other issues from frequent hotend swaps? Can we get damage or wear on the printer head itself from being too rough or doing it too frequently? (And could such damage be repaired?)
ABS is the most abrasive of them, and thus printing with it on regular basis would eventually wear and tear your nozzle faster… However, PLA and PETG should not generate this level of wear. Perhaps restoring factory settings (after saving the ones you currently have) and launching a few of the calibration prints would help determine where this problem comes from. Adding some clear photos during the process would help.
Oh I don’t have any wear problem. I need to decide if I should buy complete hotends or the cheaper variation without the electronic bits. If they rarely break, I guess it’s a waste. ABS use will probably be rare.
I’m not terribly worried about wear of the hotend itself, but I do worry I might screw up one of the wires and break a connection while swapping between different sizes.
Like Hamlet said when he was buying his printer: To buy complete hotends or not, that is the question.
if that’s what bothers you, let me tell you that I’ve bought both: complete hotends sets from .2 to .8, and 2 full sets of nozzles for each size. That way I don’t run the risk of not finding them available on Bambu’s webshop when i desperately need them, or having to wait until delivered … It also ensures the if (and when) Bambu will go out of business, i still have a reasonable stockpile of spares that will allow me to use my printer for a long time after.
I think your concerns are justified. Those connectors are intended for permanent connections, not for regular plugging in and out. If you look for a datasheet, you will find that they are specified for like 10 cycles or so. And that applies not only to the connectors on the wires but also to the mating connectors on the PCB.
This design is a very poor choice by Bambu in many respects. It is awful that you have to unplug three connectors which are very difficult to grip. The first time I wanted to change the nozzle size, I directly destroyed the fan connector. Gladly it wasn’t the counterpart in the print head.
It would be cool to have a small adapter pcb, which provides a single connector that is intended for multiple cycles.
Ok, sounds like we definitely need to be careful with these. The plugs are only supposed to “officially” be swapped out 10 times (10 “cycles”)? I expect/hope they do better than that, but it does make me more hesitant to swap out all the time without a decent reason.
I guess it’ll be complete hotends then, and possibly a spare PCB just in case.
If we ever get an X2/X2C this seems to be a good area to improve on.
I was thinking of an improved design for the entire print head and hotends. I don’t know if it’s feasible to be able to “snap” such things together (especially with the power the heater must require) but yeah, eliminating the wires entirely would be awesome. Or at least eliminate the fan and temp sensor wires.