I have had the X1C for about 6-8 months now and extremely frustrated with this thing. It seems one print works great then the next 10 absolutely something goes wrong in the print whether its blobs, nozzle build up or just adhesion issues.
I have done the cleaning of the carbon rods, dried the filament in a dryer for multiple days, printed decadent holders filled them in the entire AMS and reading 10% humidity in the AMS.
I am using Bambu only filament PETG, and PLA usually. The PLA usually doesn’t have as many issues, but the PETG is the worst.
What am I missing or is this just the nature of these printers? I feel like I bought my Creality printer all over getting this thing.
The only other thing I can think of was we had our house spray foamed and humidity in the house is about 45% at all times unless this filament is soaking up moisture that fast. Maybe a dehumidifier in this room?
As easy as Bambu printers are to use, there still can be issues. Also, low humidity in the AMS is really good - it keeps filament from picking up more water, but it’s not a good way to dry filament since it’s at room temperature. Filament needs heat to actually remove significant water.
With you saying PLA has fewer issues than PETG, and the description of what you are seeing and how you dry, it wouldn’t surprise me if your issue is water in the filament.
The pat drying instructions tell you to dry at some temperature for some amount of time but that isn’t enough to actually dry filament or know if you are even drying it. Ambient relative humidity has a big hand in if you can easily dry filament or not.
First, filament dryers can and do dry filament but not necessarily well depending on conditions. If the ambient relative humidity is high it really slows down drying and adds a floor to the drying that you won’t be able to go below. The higher the ambient humidity the worse it gets.
I don’t know if that’s the problem but it could be from your description. Pictures would help.
So, I think that is the problem, I added to the initial post it seems the problem got worse after we spray foamed our house and humidity is definitely higher. In the 45-55% range 99% of the time.
Suggest you stop using IPA and start cleaning your plates with dish soap and hot water. Without using enough IPA to actually flush oils off the plate you end up just smearing them around. Washing the plate with dish soap and hot water will lift and flush oils off of the plate.
Give the plate a really good scrub with dish soap and a clean scrub brush or magic eraser. Rinse the plate with hot water, the water should sheet off. Use a new paper towel to dab dry the remaining few water spots. Fabric softeners in towels can cause adhesion issues. Be very mindful not to touch the build area of the plate.
This should help solve most first layer issues and the “blobs” which is filament not sticking to the bed.
Thank you for the tips! I had actually tried both washing and the alcohol methods but seems to only have issues in small spots on the print.
I have attached a pistachio bowl I tried printing, and it kept doing the weird blobbing etc. I have since installed a dehumidifier in my house and drying the PETG at 50c for 12 hours.
I will try printing again after that but wondering if that is long enough. The room the filament is in stays about 40% humidity.
Note the rings near the bottom were from me pausing it to remove the blob on the nozzle that was building up which leads me to still believe its humidity.
There are a number of threads here in the forum on the difficulties of PETG printing. Recurring key issues are nozzle adhesion, curling and warping.
To improve nozzle adhesion, always set all surfaces and infills to non-crossing paths such as monotonic, gyroid and honeycomb.
To improve curling and warping, you’ll need to even the local cool down but only have effective control on the heat input. I know it sucks to take longer for a print but using adaptive layers (or just a very low layer height) and/or keeping all printing speeds below 100mm/s often means that you do not need to try again. For very fine detail (2mm and less), you may also want to drop all accelerations to 25% of their default. An X1c will travel 2mm before reaching its default speed.
Oh. PETG also gets messy with little moisture quickly. So frequent re-drying is advisable even when its been sitting only in an AMS for a while. With BVOH, I had the experience that it keeps the dessiccant dry…
So after placing the dehumidifier in my house it’s about 35-40% and the dryer has been running for 24 hours at 55c and the chamber is barely at 19% humidity. It’s a sunlu s4 and I have 3 rolls of petg and 1 roll of pla. I think this is where the issue is it just can’t get low enough the petg?
Do not worry too much about the chamber humidity. As the rolls are heated, moisture is expelled from the rolls into the chamber, raising that humidity although rolls are drying. In my crappy little dryer, humidity can go up to 100% during drying if the rolls are soaked.
If you follow these guidelines and remove the rolls when drying is completed, you should be fairly safe. Filament Drying Recommendations | Bambu Lab Wiki
To be sure, you could measure the weight of a roll before and during drying as it will loose a few grams during drying. Once the weight levels out, there’s no more water in them to be expelled. I have not found that neccessary for myself though.
This is what is frustrating me, the model was printing okay but not great and then starts doing this non sense. Filament should be dry it’s been drying for almost 48 hours at 55c to 65c.
Unless this nozzle is messed up or some
thing else?
Is this latest print with PETG? And is it with PETG or PETG-HF?
PETG is much more challenging to print and hence there are quite a few threads such as this: [SOLVED] Bad quality when printing PETG
It is usually best to first get it right with PLA before jumping to PETG. That’ll rule out printer issues such as a bent nozzle. Pic’s of the hot end with the print head cover off from 2 angles should tell you immediately if the hot end is bent. It usually shows above the cooling fins.
PETG likes to be printed slower, with all printing speeds preferably below 100.
And never use a crossing infill or surface pattern. Stick to monotonic, gyroid or honeycomb. Otherwise, the nozzle will pick up material from the print.
When printing with PLA I seem to have very minimal issues. I did a print the night before this with PLA Basic and it was pretty good except one spot which I did find odd.
I am doing it again in PLA Basic today this is with fresh cleaned bed soap and water, cleaned the nozzle completely, dried out the PLA. So, if anything, this should be near perfect.
PLA is much easier than PETG. But dropping all printing speeds and sometimes accel’s to below 100mm/s, 25% of defaults will help significantly. As does the use of non-crossing paths. There’s quite a bit in the link.
