I did BAAAAD

Bambu Lab X Series Bambu Lab X1C
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Allright, I’ve been using the X1C in my shop to print fixtures and similar for well over a year and really haven’t had to solve any technical problems apart from service items, the thing just plain works. That is, until I managed to mess things up.

Changed out the hotend fan, got interrupted by a phone call and then started the print. What I completely forgot was to reattach the screws holding the hotend. As a result the printer “printed” the whole piece before realizing something was wrong. The hotend naturally sort of fell out and dragged across the buildplate. Not sure why it didn’t realize something was wrong.

Anyways and naturally, now I’m having issues.

Popped another hotend in and the print quality is really bad. For those of you who have dug deeper into the guts of the machine, any suggestions on where to start looking? What could have been damaged?

Recalibration of the machine did little, and trying to calibrate flow results in no extrusions at all even though prints are printed, however with low quality.

IMG_4797
IMG_47971920×1440 141 KB

IMG_4798
IMG_47981920×1440 323 KB

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Not sure how you can have even a low quality print with no extrusions at all.

How old is the thermal paste in the currently installed hot end?

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Oh gosh!!! Thats awful. Im so sorry! Maybe try opening a support ticket as well

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Yeah sorry, straight after the incident it printed with a replaced hotend (paste looks good), albeit bad quality as per photo. The hotend from the incident was badly bent.

Then I recalibrated the machine and did flow calibration during which it didn’t extrude anything. Just tried doing a print and it’s stopped extruding altogether.

The stringing on the last print plus no extrusion makes me think the extruder probably was damaged so I’ll just order a new one straight away. Hopefully they can ship today.

Any other thoughts are welcome!

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Did you put fresh paste on the replacement hot end? If not, use fresh paste.

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I don’t see how the extruder could be damaged during such crash : it’s quite higher up, and has no mechanical link with the head itself

you could try to :

  1. ensure that the filament is inserted perfectly in the extruder, by manualy setting the temp and pushing the fiament, same during a filament swap

  2. take the end off, and try some external heating (I use a heatgun on low setting) to do a “hex key pull” then put the head back and check the flow
    see : https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/x1/troubleshooting/nozzle-clog

you may be lucky and be able to bend back the other head, but you’ll need some straitening device

see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZMXUw70Sw8

and

best of luck for the repair

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For future reference, the issue was the extruder.

As the hotend came loose and got pinned and dragged along the build plate the extruder kept feeding filament which probably strained the parts within it.

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