Hello!
I am about to begin printing some SWAG for a super well known company and the quality needs to be top notch. Any tips for having the best possible print quality on the Bambu X1C?
It would also be great if you could share tips for faster printing. I am making bag tags and coasters that will be multicolored, so a lot of complex stuff going on. I would love feedback from the experienced community!
Tips:
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Use the filament order of printing option.
- Use the cog/hex icon on the right of each build plate.
- Select the two sequence options (last two at the time of writing).
- Reorder your filament swatches to lightest (left) to darkest (right).
This makes sure any inadvertent filament drops are always light under dark which are significantly harder to spot.
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Wipe the build plate down between each print using a lint free cloth, no solvents or other cleaning solutions.
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Only touch the plate on the edges with the tips of your fingers. It increases the time between the need to clean.
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Group models with similar filament usage on the same build plate. If you have several using red, white, blue that do not increase (too much) the filament swatches, keep these together. As swapping is the differentiator in speed and waste, limiting is your friend.
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To further improve the print quality, you could use a 0.2 nozzle. Details in particular benefit from this, but it only makes sense if you can compensate for the time it takes by grouping objects together, as MalcTheOracle said.
I’ll dig out my good old example from the drawer, especially when the objects contain text:
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Thank you for this! I do not have access to the precise nozzle. My supplies are: Bambu X1C, 0.4 MM nozzle, rubbing alcohol, engineering paper towels, and heat gun.
Just a question for you, what is a filament swatch? I am unfamiliar with the term.
Swatch generally means a small sample or thumbnail of colour.
Watch this animation to see the process.
The swatches specifically.
Thank you so much for bringing my attention to this feature! I did not know this existed. What do I use it for? Also- by filament swatch do you mean switch?
Every once in a while, a small amount of filament will drop onto the build plate while it is moving, normally after a filament purge, the first one occurs before anything is printed.
If this happens, that filament will be on your print and subsequent layers will have it embedded into the base of the print. As coasters and keychains are usually printed face down, this is the most visible part.
Think ink stains on a shirt. A black stain shows up well on a white shirt.
If you reorder (switch) the swatches (colour representations of your filament choices) so the lightest is left most and the darkest is right most in the sequence feature, this greatly minimises any imperfections.
If you only have high contrasting colours, this will not benefit you, black and white for example. Because, the high contrasting colours will ‘contrast’ so obviously.
As most designs have multiple colours and usually sit in the middle of contrasting colours, this means their impact is minimised as far less obvious if they occur.
Thank you! So a swatch is just a representation of my filament choice in the slicer?
Yes.
Swatch is not a 3D printer or slicer term.
It has many uses, think “fabric swatch”, but in this context it means…
A patch or area of a material or surface.
“the sunset had filled the sky with swatches of deep orange”
verb
If you do not have the smaller nozzle, you are limiting the achievable detail. You asked how to get the best quality. A smaller nozzle is one of the primary levers.
The second lever is speed. Either reduce overall speed to 50% via silent mode or manually lower top surface and outer wall speeds, depending on the geometry.
Right now, no model has been shared, so any advice will be generic. Geometry drives tuning decisions. You do not need to disclose branding. Upload the model without the logo. That allows the community to give geometry-specific guidance rather than guess.
Nozzles are cheap and readily available:
https://us.store.bambulab.com/products/bambu-hotend-x1c
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Brother if those are the only supplies that a
super well known company
provides to execute a job, you might wanna reconsider that they might be setting you up to fail
Anyways
Increasing quality is as easy as running all the tests and saving the results. Pressure advance, flow rate for every filament. VFA test to see if there’s any speeds the machine should avoid. If the model is delicate at all, consider lowering base speeds to increase success rate. Etc