Has anyone had good prints with Bambu Basic PLA Silver? I received some last week and dried it before use. I printed some gridfinity bins that were pretty poor quality and then tried a larger storage bin with simple geometry that came out stringy as hell.
So I dried the filament again and ran a full calibration. The K factor was showing 0.016 which is way outside the specs of any other Bambu filament I have used. My next print showed only minimal improvement.
I have seen other posts about problems with the silver. Has anyone had good results with this filament or is it just garbage?
EDIT: I am printing on a P1S without the automatic flow compensation. After seeing a couple responses I thought this could make a difference.
This begs my curiosity, what would you consider a normal range? I see figures between 0.014 (magenta) and 0.021 (green and orange) for Bambu PLA Basic and 0.4 nozzle, and even 0.028 for Bambu PLA Glow. I never knew what to consider normal but they all print just fine. Those calibrations were automatic.
BTW with a 0.6 nozzle, the orange was 0.012 which is quite a difference from the above, and with a 0.8 nozzle it was 0.019. I assume itās normal for them to be affected by nozzle size.
The only really consistent test results Iāve had was with my 0.2 nozzle. Every single filament Iāve tested came out as 0.060 (all PLA Basic, just different colors and spools).
Edit: I think I have that silver, in an unopened box. Iāll try it out and report back.
Edit 2: Nope, that was PLA Silk Silver. FWIW that one got a K of 0.023 with 0.4 nozzle but an unusually high 0.058 with 0.8 nozzle.
Sounds like you have a lot more experience than me at this. I have been printing with a .4mm nozzle and all the other color Bambu filaments I tried seem to be very close to the default K 0.02 (pink, cyan, orange, white, red, blue grey). So much that I only run calibration if I see something funny or have a difficult print to do. Other brands have ranged from 0.016 - 0.021. I am only using well known brands (Polymaker, Overture, Creality).
I feel like Bambu tries to make their products as close to āclick to printā as possible. My experience has been that you can be lazy and throw a roll of Bambu filament in the AMS and let the software do the work. Iām confident that this is just a bad roll of filament and would like to know if all the Bambu Silver is bad.
That is just lighting. Trust me, it is all silver.
The general rule I use when 3D printing and modding is: Never mod anything unless there is a very good reason to do so.
So I never āupgradeā my printers or ācalibrateā my settings outside of standard BBL settings unless there is a really good reason to do so.
If standard settings donāt work for you it might be that there is something wrong with the machine and changing settings will not fix that. You might even be hiding technical issues by changing settings. You need to first make sure your printer is working correctly befor tweaking settings.
If you tweak a lot of things on a printer and its settings you can really shoot yourself in the foot. Not saying that is what you did, but be careful.
Did you try and print the same gcode using other filament? Was the result better?
This is the only filament I have had issues with. I can print the same model, same settings with any other filament and it comes out beautiful. Silver - no dice.
Weird. You would think the problem is in the filament than indeed.
Did you try a different AMS slot?
Also it is worth measuring the diameter of the filament end how consistent it is. I have had issues using ABS that had thicker parts in the filament line. The printer assumes the filament diameter is constant so that might be a cause.
Glad I did a search for Silver PLA as I have had some issues trying to print on Silver PLA Basic (Mac mini case to give indication of scale). As a newbie I figured it was because it was a large model. Based on your post I just tried to print in Black PLA Basic with exactly the same settings (apart from AMS source) and the difference is very stark. Attached pics are from 2 sides.
I did try something small and it seemed fine. I also switched to Gyroid infill as the nozzle was hitting the base after a few layers on Silver.
I guess I am naive in thinking manufacturer material of same type would have a consistent experience. From a quick search looks like some issues go back to February (so not just a bad batch).
Different ingredients are used to make different colors, regardless of manufacturer, so each filament can require different settings. Best you can hope for is that the next spool of the same type and color from that manufacturer will print the same, but itās not guaranteed.
My conclusion based on feedback here and also some other posts:
The Bambu Silver PLA is not ready for prime time. Bambu should immediately discontinue production and recall/refund the stuff that has been recently sold. Then they should take the time to reformulate or provide custom settings for this filament.
Since the AMS can read the RFID tag, there is no reason why Bambu could not automatically provide the proper settings. Iām not going to take my time to figure it out when there are other manufacturers that provide good silver PLA.
Hello.
I opened this topic. I tried everything and got the best results after changing the hot end and drying the PLA. Still, itās not perfect. I started using matte PLA.
Thanks for the recommendation to set Max Volumetric Speed to 12mm3/s.
Just did a print and it is āperfectā and similar to the other Bambu Basic PLA colours. From the other feedback, Iām guessing there is quite a difference in whatever is required to make the Silver.
Nice! My printer has been tied up with a multi-day print so I havenāt been able to get back to this issue and test the volumetric speed but it makes perfect sense. The issue presents itself most on long straight runs where the toolhead can build up speed.
Also easy for Bambu to swap the label and RFID to Silk PLA or something which prints at 12.
So I have been busy with holidays and projects but I wanted to give a quick summary.
Before I made this post I contacted Bambu support. When I got a standard response I became impatient and went here to the forums. A couple days later the community here figured out what was going on and how to solve the problem.
About the same time the support team got back to me to see if I still needed help so I directed them to this thread. Here was the response from Bambu:
As a follow up, the team noted that the profile for this specific filament needs a few minor changes. You can either use the silk filament profile or manually change the max volumetric flow to 15mm/s3 as shown below.
Iāve half a roll of PLA basic silver which I donāt remember giving me trouble but I will note this on the box as I probably wonāt remember this thread by tomorrow
Edit: Just remembered Iāve a spool of bronze which didnāt print as well as I would have thought. Noted this on the box for that spool also.
