Hello! Does anyone have experience with the larger .8 hot ends or does the quality stink? I want to try to reduce print time for general projects (hobby). I have mostly .4, with one .6. Still a newbie. Want to get either more .6 or jump to .8. I assume that eventually I will want them all. EDIT: Had wrong decimal places!
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Hi, in my case (H2D) the stock profiles for the .8mm nozzle are pretty much useless, the quality is terrible, but most my prints were mediocre yet, i`ve to figure out, whats wrong - .4mm was decent (at least with calibrated BBL ASA) .8mm no matter if BBL filament or 3rd party was terrible even calibrated
maybe someone more experienced can join in
kind regards
Not bambu related, but I bought a .6 nozzle for one of my other printers. It’s a large machine, so I thought it would be better with a large nozzle.
I wasn’t happy with either the print strength of the quality of the finished product. The machine puts out a larger bead of plastic, but it also is a lot slower because it needs more time to cool. I didn’t really see any savings in time, just worse finished parts.
.4 is kind of a sweet spot for 3D printing, and it’s probably why it has become the standard.
I’m sure someone else will be have more bambu specific information…
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SLOWER? I did not see that coming! I wonder if the H2C’s cooling is better to offset that?
I think, based on the comments here I will order 4 more .6 ends and go from there.
Thank you both!
I bought a left 0.8 left nozzle as I printed my AMS rack out of about 7 kg of Bambu PETG HF.
At least with this material and in case you do not want spend more material, the top layer quality look very bad. Since in case if you print 0.8 mm thick top layers using 0.4, you have 4 layers to even out the infill bridging errors. However in case you want to use the same amount of material (meaning 0.8 mm thick top layers) you only have 2 layers to correct the bridging errors, which does not work. And in case you would still use 4 layers, you would use a lot more material and the time gain would shrink.
I as well tried the 0.8 nozzle using a 0.2 layer high. However the time saving went down and it did look much worse as the 0.4 nozzle.
This is some general consideration and could probably have a better outcome with tuning in this use case. However if I use a 0.4 HF nozzle, it just works out of the box…
@TBeaulieu Since I do not plan to use my left hotend 0.8 nozzles anymore, I could send them to you for cheap in case you are located in Germany. I would not expect any major quality difference between a 0.8 left and 0.8 induction hotend.
In my experience the issue with 0.8 mm isn’t the nozzle itself, but top layer thickness and volumetric flow limits.
If you keep the same top thickness as 0.4 but reduce the number of layers, surface quality will suffer.
Also, without a high-flow hotend, you often become melt-limited and need to slow down, which removes the time advantage.
For most functional parts, 0.6 mm high-flow is a better balance between speed and quality.
Your insight is SO above my current knowledge base. I ordered a set of .6. Thank you!
Nice choice
0.6 is a great middle ground — you’ll get faster prints and stronger walls without the surface issues that 0.8 can introduce.
Play a bit with layer height (0.28–0.32) and keep top thickness in mm rather than just layer count. You should see solid results right away.
Let us know how it goes!
Sometimes it can save time, sure. Overall time depends on many factors. And some parts may not need high quality surface or high precision.
As a simplified example here are some wire shelving leg brackets I needed to anchor a shelf bolted to the top of a work table (shelf is over the printer, so lots of wobbling). A .8 nozzle worked great for this since it was more about strength than refinement. With only difference being line width, the whole print saves ~40 minutes, or around 16% faster. Not ground braking, but not zero.
0.8 nozzle:
0.6 nozzle:
As I mentioned this is just a simplified example… one could also increase line width of a .6mm nozzle, increase layer height, print speed, and whatever other settings to speed things up.
Anyway, I think playing with different settings and nozzles in the slicer can be very interesting, and doesn’t cost anything.
And I agree the .6 size seems like a great middle ground, and I end up using those more than the .8 size.
Cheers,
-Max
I have an old-school printer (no closed loop extrusion, no resonance compensation, single extruder and hot end) that I built about 8 or 9 years ago and still use. It has a 1mm nozzle. I use it to print large objects, many in vase mode. I have used it to print other things, but when the nozzle gets large it is difficult to control the extrusion and get quality prints. Retraction is a particular problem, and of course, a large nozzle can’t print much detail.
BBL seems to have the extrusion figured out, and with an automated cover that goes over the nozzle and prevents drooling it might be possible that they are getting good print quality out of a 0.8 mm nozzle, but print detail will still be limited.
I bought the H2C so that I could print smaller, more detailed objects than my old machine.
Thanks Max. Quite relevant.
I will eventually get around to the .8 I assume, but I will experiment with the .6 set that I ordered last night. Thanks!
I use my .8 nozzle for quick prototypes. I created a .56 layer height profile that basically is just one wall and very few top / bottom layers. I wouldn’t plan on printing finished products with it, but it will lay down some filament.
I mainly do functional prints so this works for me.
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I never rely on default profiles, since they are just a starting template . I consider 0.6 mm a good middle ground and only use 0.8 mm when it is genuinely necessary. With a 0.8 mm nozzle you lose a significant amount of detail compared to 0.6 mm, and in many real-world cases you gain surprisingly little in terms of print time, especially once you hit the filament’s volumetric flow limit.
My h2d is much faster with the .6 than the .4 but the quality is sacrificed more than I’m willing too. I have ran some .2 for a few finer detail items and they do slow it down but much finer detail. So in the end yes the .4 is the sweet spot for balanced quality and speed.
Ah, if only bambu slicer would get support for multiple nozzle sizes on the H2C we could get fast printing on the inside walls and details where we need them.
I’m not so sure about that. Sparse infill is a single line width. The real advantage to using a larger nozzle comes from printing thicker layers. I guess if you ran 0.2mm perimeter layers with a 0.4mm nozzle and did sparse infill using 0.4mm layers using a 0.8 mm nozzle, at every second 0.2mm perimeter layer it might save a little time. Am I missing something?
I just got some new hotends for my A1 (.2, .4, .6 and .8), and I’m currently experimenting with them. I’ma print a Benchy with each, and I can upload a picture if you want.
Nope, exactly that. Do really fine layers with a small nozzle, do the inside of the model using double layer hight on thicc nozzles.
Fromm what I’ve seen, you cannot mix nozzles on a H2C.