Horrible - I’ve spent more time on fixing problems :@
0voters
I’m aware that people are normally motivated to post about a product when they have problems with it. The same applies to restaurant reviews on Google Maps etc…
A lot of the posts are talking about adhesion issues, nozzle scraping of infill, clogged nozzles, AMS failing to pull/feed the filaments etc…
Are there people who didn’t have any of the above issues? I ordered the A1 yesterday but I’m kind of worries as I never had any issues with my Ender 3 V2 Neo (expect the first 2 months as I was new to 3D printing)
How come the reviewers -the trusted ones- received “perfect” printers?
Because many of them have been using 3D printers for some years and they only share their results after failing numerous times while working to get the printer tuned.
A 3D printer isn’t something you should expect to unbox, hit print, and get perfect results. If you put the time in, you should be able to achieve good results.
I’m having an issue at 19 days of owning the printer. The heat bed normally printed at 65 or 66 degrees. In the middle of a print I was doing the heat bed started displaying it was at 95 degrees but it was completely cold. If I turn the printer on (its been off for 3 days) the heat bed temp on the display says it is at 95 and rises to 100 but of course its completely cold. I can’t print because the heat bed does not heat up at all. I opened a service ticket on 1/13/24 and Bambu didn’t respond until 1/17/24 and all they asked me was can I use the “control” tab on the settings to manually lower the temp, which I can’t, so I advised no. Now I’m still waiting for another response! I’ve asked since the printer is 19 days old with a critical failure / mfg defect to follow their warranty / return policy and replace the printer. I CAN’T get them to respond. I have over $300 of filament just sitting here and I paid $632 for the A1 Combo and I can’t use it. It really sucks!! I’m hoping I’m not going to have to dispute the charges with my bank, so we’ll see.
I think part of it is also that they have a lot of printing experience and can pick up indications of a problem or issue before it happens. They know how to slice models, they know how filament should print, they know how important it is to clean the bed and they know what pitfalls to avoid. Their whole workflow is already established for success. This knowledge also allows them to showcase a printers true strengths and weaknesses without external variables such as filament or environment.
I bought my dad an A1 Combo and it’s been great for him. He had a few issues at first, but it was new user stuff. He’s been printing up a storm since. He loves it!
He had an Anycubic Vyper before, which was a pretty easy to use printer overall. Didn’t need mods or anything. So, doesn’t have modding/troubleshooting experience like an Ender user might.
The user errors were around the sd card he got, he had trouble formatting it because it was 128 gigs, and windows won’t format that to fat32 by default, and neither will the a1. Common thing, found a utility that would do it. Other issue was he didn’t realize he had to select the right printer, so when he sliced it and tried to send it to the printer he got the error about it being the wrong gcode. I think he just missed that drop down. Added the x1c profile too, to see how it compared or something. Just little silly things you do your first time with a new setup you aren’t familiar with.
I believe the issues i had were caused by technical / software issue of having two printers with one ams and a user taking a couple of things for granted, like setting bambu handy to read the rfid tags for both printers seperatley rather than it being a global setting / using the ams with the A1 rather than the mini it was purchased and synched to the cloud with, after a resynch with the A1 ive had no issues since, oh and one other issue was i added the purge fitment to early ( in haste before calibrating ) which meant id trapped the print head in its original position
like google you need to sort out the difference between real and fictional reviews / issues
i think that is the whole point to the A1 series…
its aimed at the less knowledgeable printing crowed, but still offers great things for the more advanced users.
my experience with the A1 mini was perfect if i was new to the scene.
I have 3000h of combined printing time on my 4 printers. (P1Sx2, A1Mini, A1)
In that time I have had to replace 2 nozzles, and had to do a bit of disassembly in either the AMS or hotend to clear jams 4 times. Probably no more than 8 hours of maintenance time in total. Add about 6 hours of routine cleaning and lead screw lubrication in that time. My Printing:Maintenance ratio feels great.
Comparing this to my previous Ender printer is laughable. I spent more time levelling that thing than printing with it. I won’t even start on the fail rate…oof.
I have had less than .5% of my prints fail on my BBL printers, and have easily gone through 50+ kgs of PLA. Of those failures most were my fault due to touching the bed or leaving too many purge lines that got caught up on the nozzle.
I think these printers are fantastic, and revived my love for this hobby. With a bit of time on the wiki you can solve almost every issue yourself, not that you will frequently encounter them.
All nice additions. I’m thinking we’ll see those features on newer Bambu Lab printers too as they really aren’t just features that new 3D printer users can benefit from. A1 users just arrived at the right time.
Reminds me of when I first started 3d printing. Had several kits I had put together that I got off of aliexpress. I tried and tried and tried to get them all running at the same time, but never could. There was always something not working and as soon as I fixed one, another would break.
I accidentally broke one of the ribbon cables on the print head of my P1S, causing the filament detection to fail. Only problem I’ve had, and I caused it. Getting the part was slow, over the holidays, but fixing it was a breeze.
You’re the type of person that does well with 3d printing in general. You figured out your problem by troubleshooting/research, ounce you found the issue, you owned that you were the cause of it. You ordered the part and were patient during a very busy time. Once the part arrived you installed and were back printing. Often the posts on this forum show that not everyone is at the same level and thus struggle with 3d printing.
I switched from my ender 3 v2 to the a1 because i was sick of spending hours on calibrating instead of printing. At the start i loved that thing. Klick, print et voila it was just perfect. But now i‘m stuck with support because i had to order spar parts (with 20€ shipping fee) because the hottend clogged adter 8 days and the spar part are faulty and no answer from support. I‘m really hoping this thing works soon again and i get some support and they reimburse the shipping fee or send me at least some sparparts that work. Because i don‘t want to go back to my ender.
Oh I’m aware. I always try and be patient with people because of that. I have a lot of experience that helps me with these things, and no matter how trivial a problem may seem, to someone that doesn’t know it, it’s not trivial at all. Haha.
I printed one of those 3d sets R/C cars, which was fun. I was kind of frustrated because they didn’t really include much information on the electronics side of it. Coming into that, and not knowing any of the terminology that’s used, it’s difficult to know where to even start sometimes. On-top of that, the recommended components didn’t seem like they fit the specs to work with each other, and there was no explanation why those particular components.
Those first experiences can ruin the whole of it too. Especially with 3d printing, where things can get frustrating very quickly. I mean, I even have times where I need to just walk away and breathe. Even with the Bambu. I mean, again, I recognize it’s me and needing to adjust my approach.(thinking about failed prints) Before I get to that rational though it’s a lot of anger and frustration.
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I’ve had the A1 Combo for about a week now and it’s been great.
But I just have to say that my previous printer, and Ender 3 V2 was also great! 2,500 hours of printing, a handful of failures in that time. I did add some upgrades to it like the BL Touch, so I never had to level it after that and a Raspberry Pi and camera etc. I did replace the bed plate a couple of times.
But the A1 is the next step up. Comes with all those upgrades included and the convenience of the AMS even if not doing mutil-colour printing is great (have you most commonly used filaments on it and ready).
That’s funny, what finally got me to order my BBL printer was ordering a bltouch, going to install it, and learning that the mobo in my printer was 8-bit and too old to use bltouch without a lot of manual steps.
I ordered a P1S combo that night and returned the unused bltouch.
