I’m new to 3d printing with an A1 mini (with AMS lite) as my first machine. Everything has been going great so far, but I recently discovered that the printer won’t load the Bambu brand Neon City (Blue-Magenta) dual color PLA silk filament I bought along with everything else.
Printer prints very nicely with other Bambu PLAs (Matte, Basic, Metal, single-color-silk) and all 4 AMS hubs/filament intake holes on the extruder module work fine with other filaments. This one refuses to load regardless.
(All of my printing has been done via the AMS lite, and from some discussion I linked below I don’t know if the back tension from the AMS unit would be wrong for this particular filament. I’ll try from the attached spool arm later today and report if it changes anything).
I searched around for ideas about this and it seems I’m not the first to encounter this issue, (threads linked below). I confirmed with my digital caliper what others were noting: the dual color silk filaments are fairly oval, mine varies from 1.5 mm to 1.8 or so.
I am new to printing, I don’t know how normal this is or not, and reading the other threads leaves me still a bit confused.
1: Is the filament within design tolerances or not? Is this a manufacture issue? Should I try to send the filament back?
2: If the filament is as designed, why won’t it load into this printer?
3: What do I not know to ask or do next for an issue like this?
If it’s oval, the answer is absolutely, no. IMO, I’d return it as being defective.
Good filament makers will tell you the tolerance for their filament, typically around ±0.03 mm. At that level, you can’t tell just by looking at it. I wouldn’t touch anything with a variance of more than 0.04 mm.
Weirdly, I’ve never printed with dual-color silk, only single or triple-color, and had no issues with those (Sovol triple and Atomic single)
But yeah, I try to make sure I know the useful questions. I’m an experienced debugger in my own field, but not anything remotely like this one. As much as I can do to jumpstart my path to quickly getting to the root of an issue, the happier I’ll be
I can not get the Bambu Lab Neon City dual silk to load or feed on my A1. I tried several other brands, SunLu, Ttty3d, and AMOLEN. No problems with those brands. I am going to give this roll of BL dual to a friend of mine with a X1C to see if he has the same issue.
UPDATE: Just for grins and giggles I even tried an AMOLEN triple silk and I worked just fine. I suspect a manufacturing defect in the Bambu dual.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I had my friend with the X1C try to print with this dual silk and he had no issues with it what so ever. So I am going to venture a guess that the difference in the extruder design between the X1C and the A1 are enough to cause issues with the dual silk filament. End result, I will not purchase and more of the Bambu dual silk since I know other brands work just fine.
Hey there, just submit a ticket, they will make it right - it might just take a while. In my case, they sent me replacement filaments of my choice of equal value. You can probably keep the oval filament too. I managed to extrude the oval filament (albeit slowly) on another printer with a dual gear extruder (a1 has a single gear extruder so it won’t grip oval filament quite as well).
After the dual silk work fine for a X1C I tried it again in the A1. No joy there. No matter what I adjusted or tweaked there is no way the dual silk will work on my A1. Oh well, lesson learned. To add insult to injury other brands of dual and triple silk work just fine in the A1.
I thought I was the only one. Kind of disappointed in this situation because I just ordered three more spools. Any issues with P1P, P1S or X1C? I’m on the road with my A1mini so that’s all I have to test on. Right now it’s off the AMS and back in the box. Tired of fooling with it.
Good to hear they work in the other printers so not a total fail as I have one each of all the printers so far. It is a huge disappointment however for folks that have A1 mini or the big brother A1. Hope Bambu figures it out.
That’s to bad. Should have had more QA/QC prior to release (IMHO). At least tell customers up front that it’s outside spool only. would have saved a lot of money!
I have two of these spools, and my A1 couldn’t feed either. I did some science and can confirm it’s highly eliptical. Both of the colourways I have are very similar, so it seems unlikely it’s a batch issue.
I’d be very interested if anyone has any of this filament that doesn’t exhibit this issue, or has printed it (in a multicolour AMS print) on their A1.
I’m specifically saying “in an AMS print” because if you’re doing a single colour print, you can often coax the filament into the extruder by hand and then it will continue to feed. An AMS print requires the printer to be able to load the filament into the extruder itself, which it can’t.
I had a fascinating reply from Rick at Bambu tech support about this!
To ensure that the filament does not rotate during the printing process and thus provide the dual-colour effect, the filament of PLA Silk Dual Color is designed to be oval instead of circular; that is, its average diameter is 1.75 mm, and the actual value is mainly in the range of 1.60 mm to 1.85 mm.
You may have received a filament spool outside of these specifications.
So it sounds like it is oval by design!
He has offered to sent me replacements once I take a video of one of the filaments failing to load, so that’s my next step.
