Hello,
For almost a Year now, I’ve ran into an issue with Z-Banding on my A1 - Or at least, I highly suspect that it’s Z-Banding. I am by no means inexperienced, and have spent more hours than I’d like to admit perfecting Slicer Settings in order to print Miniatures with FDM - And for the most part, I’m very happy with what I achieved.
Please take a look at this picture. Both of these Miniatures have been printed using my own, custom High Quality Profile designed to print Miniatures with a 0.2 Nozzle. The Knight has already been primed, but other than that, everything is the same: The Filament, the Printer, the Settings, the Enviroment.
As you can see, the Z-Banding on the Knight is absolutely massive, whereas there is almost no Banding, if any, visible on the Ogre to the right. If this were a mechanical issue, then the Z-Banding should occur at around the same Layer Height. And indeed, if I reprint the Knight, it occurs at the same spot every time.
So: It doesn’t happen with EVERY Model, but whenever it DOES happen, it’s at almost the exact same spots. So at first, I concluded that this might be an issue with my Settings - So I switched to the Stock Bambu Profiles. No Success. The Z-Banding still occured, only now at slightly different Locations. I’ve tried a different material: The Z-Banding was still there, only now at a different intensity. So whatever is causing this, seems to be a combination of issues with the Hardware, Slicer Setting and Geometry of the Model.
I’ve tried everything I could think off.
I have:
- Tried several different Nozzles
- Tried different filaments, Bambu, Sunlu, eSun
- Cleaned the Extruder Gears
- Cleaned and lubricated the Z-Rods
- Tightned all the Belts
- Tightened the screws behind the Nozzle
- Tried different Settings, including the Default Bambu Settings
- Tried the Auto-Flow-Calibration
- Manually Calibrated Temperature, Flow Ratio, Pressure Advance
- Tried out different Build Plates as well as Gluesticks to reduce the Risk of Micromovements due to imperfect Adhesion
- Replaced my Cooling Fans in case the issue is tied to that
- Re-levelled the bed multiple times
- Manual A1 Bed Tramming
- Countless Cold-Pulls on top of the Nozzle Switches
- Reset the MicroSD Card of the Printer
- Placed the Printer on a Cement Tile + Foam Tile to elimate Vibrations
And after all that: The issue is still there. It doesn’t matter whether I print a Miniature with a 0.2 Nozzle or a larger print with the 0.4 Nozzle. When the Z-Banding decides to show up, it’s here to stay. And at this point, I’ve ran completely out of ideas. I’ve contacted the Customer Support, and am awaiting an Answer, but I wanted to reach out to the Community as well. At this point I’m starting to think that there is either a Hardware Issue somewhere that I’m missing, or the 6000+ hours of printing have finally caught up to me and I’m slowly going insane.