Hyper Aggressive Wiping?

Bambu Lab X1 Series
1

I’ve owned a Prusa MK3S for about two years now and print PETG almost exclusively on it. For the last six months, I’ve been using it for work and have been getting “paid” in filament. Need a project? Order twice the filament I need, any color, and I keep the extra. I loved it, free prints for six months.

However, the time of gluttony has ended as my employers has purchased a Bambu X1C with AMU. The X1C does most things better. The main thing it seems to do better is that it virtually eliminates stringing.

I brought the printer home this weekend to do some additional off-hours testing. I printed a stringing test tower on my Prusa and I printed the same model on the X1C. I used the same spool of filament, and intentionally chose a spool that wasn’t dry.

ksnip_20230121-095045
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When watching the printer go, it seems that the wiping motion is really aggressive. Is that my imagination? When I watch my MK3S, I can’t even see the wiping motion. On the X1C, it looks like it could scramble an egg. Does this wiping contribute significantly to eliminating stringing?

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If you’re not doing a multicolor print, there are only two wipes - one at the very start and one after first layer inspection. PETG tends to ooze, leading to stringing. I suspect the differences are more speed of movement and retraction.

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@henry Thanks for sharing your demo photo.

Were the results shown in the photo the result of using the stock slicer settings on both the X1C and the Prusa?

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I believe we’re talking about two different wipes. The “hyper aggressive wiping” I am referring to is whenever the nozzle moves away from the model to a new location. For example, each of the little towers in the print are printed as follows:

  1. Inner perimeter - You can see the head move in an almost circular motion
  2. Outer perimeter - You can see the head move in an almost circular motion
  3. Infill - Again, you can see the head move in an almost circular motion
  4. Retract-n-wipe - And again, you can see the head do yet again another circular motion but it is FAST compared to the previous 3.

What it is doing in step 4, if I’m not mistaken, is an AGGRESSIVE wiping motion on the model. It retracts the filament to reduce the pressure, then wipes any oozing back into the model.

On my Prusa printer, I have wiping enabled, but I cannot physically see it happen. I can see the commands for wiping in the output g-code, but I cannot actually see the extruder perform the movement.

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The Bamu model (the one that looks good, in case that wasn’t clear but I believe it was) was sliced with stock settings, but I may have increased layer height to 0.3mm instead of the default 0.28mm draft mode. I also did some other tweaks like disabling the brim. I did not adjust the retraction settings.

For the Prusa model, about a year ago I did some PETG retraction testing using wet filament. I ended up with 1.2mm retraction instead of 0.8mm (the stock value) as that seemed to be an improvement. After I got it as good as I could with profile tweaks, I then dried the filament in a dehydrator and the print came out looking like a glossy PLA.

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