Full side photo, beta has .32, the qidi went a liitle further, I only did it to show the vfa in straight sections, yes that was a typo, They both buckled, but the buckle in the bambu is less because the wall is shorter, and all we are trying to look at here is the vfa lines. Zoom in to see them better.
To me, it just looks like the qidi offsets the toogh impact. i believe, thats why there are more marks but less pronounced. Closer to 1mm spacing. Im guessing that the timing of the bambu has multiple belts impacting the same. No clue though.
This test was based on the flow rate test, and done with petg. For a cleaner comparison, look at the silk pla pics i posted of the actual VFA test. This was just jn response to others. Neither printer flows very fast, so this was doomed to be a poor comparison
Edit: it is the belt design. The qidi belts had to be wider because they use a finer tooth. Also why the vfa is finer and shallow
Oh, OK, I think I understand now what youāre getting at. To paraphrase, you notice that there is a connection between the tooth spacing on the belt and the spacing of the vfa periods on the prints. Good catch.
I wonder if a v groove belt would be possible. Everything would have to be under alot of tension though, or all grooved pulleys would need to have a textured coating.
Or maybe get rid of them entirely, like Peopoly does with their linear motor design. It might be worth checking what kind of VFAās Peopoly is having, if any. As shown by your recent photo comparison, the belts/pulleys do seem implicated, either directly or indirectly, in VFA production, assuming there arenāt any other differences that might account for it (like, for instance, some kind of additional differences, maybe in stepper motors, or some such). @Nebur may have thoughts in that regard. At this point Iām way beyond anything Iām qualified to comment upon and am merely spitballing, and in that regard, āItās not all going to be gold,ā to quote Simon Pegg from Mission Impossible. Anyhow, overall, Iād say itās been a productive day! Good work! Thanks for sharing your photos and observations. I feel as though Iāve learned a lot over the last couple of days on the VFA topic, about which I previously had some vague awareness but otherwise knew nothing at all beyond that. My hats off to anyone who can take this further and find a solution that wipes them out entirely across the full spectrum of possible speedsā¦ As for me, being a less ambitious pragmatist, I think I now know enough that I can better avoid them in the current generation of hardware, and thatās something I can put to use right away. Win-win-win all the way around.
Thanks, everyone, for answering my sometimes bonehead questions. And, thanks @Hank , for bringing your perspective as well in regards to other matters. Iāve had a ball and loads of fun the entire weekend.
Found a good comparison today. Elegoo Matte black actually made the most visible effect. I know it doesnt look matte, this is how elegoo rolls. Who would have guessed. Bambu on left and qidi on right with the resonance avoidance turned on in qidislicer.
quite a bit of stringing on Qidi, from what the comparison photos show. Turned off the resonance on Bambu as well, or just printed it with the standard settings?
Whatās interesting about the resonance compensation is that there has to be some way to climb from the safe 70mm/sec up through the bad range of 71mm-149mm/sec in order to arrive at 150mm/sec+. Itās not like it can be done instantaneously, so it must somehow make an allowance for the time needed to do that while still avoiding VFA. In that sense, maybe the more power you have to drive the acceleration/deceleration, the better, so as to rush through the āVFA speed zoneā as quickly as possible. The slicer preview doesnāt seem to provide much in the way of fine grained detail in that regard. Or, maybe it happens so fast anyway that itās not really much of an issue. Perhaps just avoiding dwelling in the 71mm-149mm/sec speed zone is a āgood enoughā improvement. If thatās the case, it would seem that upgrading the X1C firmware for better VFA avoidance would be relatively straightfoward.
Having just now updated the firmware on my Qidi, I can definitely make Bambu look good by describing the process.
Despite being connected to the internet, the printer canāt download the firmware update, let alone automatically install it like the X1C can. Nooooo. That would be too easy.
You use google to find it on the Qidi website, which directs you to github. Thatās where you download it.
It downloads as a zip file. OK, now what? You know you have to put it on a usb stick to do the update, but in what format? The .zip file you just downloaded? Nooooo. That would be too easy.
You must unzip it. In the unzipped folder, you will find additional files which are zipped. you must unzip those too. No directions for any of this. The icing on the cake is you must figure out what file structure to put on the thumbdrive. Which files go at the root? No directions for that either. If you get it wrong, no update.
OK, so you get the file structure right. You insert the thumb drive. It should update right away, right? Noooo. That would be too easy.
You have to power cycle it. If all your ducks are in a low, it then begins a very slow and lengthy update process. Come back in maybe 15 minutes or a half hour.
Great! It updated. Your reward is that it forgot the wifi credentials. You need to enter that all over again. Then you need to manually run bed-leveling calibration again and then manually run input shaper calibration again. Oh, and donāt forget to re-establish z-height using their special paper shim. It forgot that too. Matter of fact, it didnāt remember anything. It thinks it was born for the first time two minutes ago.
Now youāre doneā¦ until the next time. Oh, joy, what fun.
With that behind you, you can now get on with things. The printer works, but youāre left wondering what kind of moron is in charge of user experience. Uh, probably nobody. Yep, that would be nobody for sure. It just boggles my mind the idiocy of it.
Thatās why I say: thank god itās running klipper, and fluidd/moonraker, and orca slicer. Just imagine if we had to rely on their in-house software development for anything more than the firmware. Youād probably blow your brains out. Ironically, itās the west that has saved them from falling on their face, so they can undercut all the western hardware manufacturers using their generic hardware run using free open source western software. The irony is thick. We handed the business to them with both hands. At least to me, it doesnāt feel like they really deserve it. If @Hank is right, they have the business for basically one reason: you can hire engineers there at $500 a month, and probably gofers for less, which undercuts anyone in the west who might want to do it. No one in the West can live on that. At least not in the West.
It should haveā¦ but it didnāt ā¦and the results: opportunities loss, increased customer dissatisfaction, sales decrease, brand reputation loss (one might argue " what reputation?"), loss of customer trust ā¦ the list might go on for a whileā¦
Makes total sense. If you want a larger build volume as well as a built-in heated chamber on an enclosed printer, it and the Plus 3/4ās may be the only ones currently on the market in the <$1,500 range.
Some people have claimed success in modding their X1C by adding a third-party chamber heater to it. If you have the skills and the will and the time to do it, I guess thereās that if you donāt want or need a larger build volume. Itās tempting, but my experience with printer mods in general has always turned out to be āeasier said than done,ā almost regardless of what the mod is, unless itās one of the very few that has had widespread adoption and lots of successful testimonies about how easy it was.
Care to share the source(s) for that mod, eventually the third-party heater, and, if available, the links to the videos showing how the mod has being successfully implemented? Or point out where to look for those?
Thereās at least three or four long threads on the Bambu forum where people have shown generic third-party 50w PTC heaters installed inside their X1Cās, or other active heating mods. Picking one of them at random, hereās an example:
as well as others which rely on just adding insulation and/or air sealing to better capture passively generated heat, usually by preceding a print with a long heat soak.
Did it work as intended? I get it that in the meantime youāve reconsidered your position, but Iām interested to learn if at the time your efforts paid off as expected or were just an attempt to improvement that ultimately wasnāt worth the time and effort?
I have a tpu seal I use on the left hand of the door. I have a very thin foam tape down the right in place of the rubber that came with it, and along to the top. The top is tricky because too thick and it wonāt allow door to close.
Nothing under the my riser. I tried foam, tpu, and number of things and it never sat right. My riser has a lip for the top glass and I have foam adhesive tape along all 4 sides. I canāt remember thicknes but 1/8 comes to mind.
From there, nothing else other than the Bento. I can get to 56-60 reliably, soaking for about 10 min first. I usually start before itās up to temp, never have any issues with warping on ABS (all flavors) ASA, and to some extent PA6-GF but that filament hates me.
Iāve printed small parts, large parts and this is just right parts. Iāve printed 3/4 of the bed with no issues. Generally use the smooth PEI (although I now have a carbon fibre plate) and a little liquid glue, except for PA (stick glue).
If youāre going up in filament, like the real exotics then you will need an active heater. I tried and found it to be more than what was needed to accomplish what I needed.
Anyhow, overall, Iād say itās been a productive day! Good work! Thanks for sharing your photos and observations. 
I feel as though Iāve learned a lot over the last couple of days on the VFA topic, about which I previously had some vague awareness but otherwise knew nothing at all beyond that. My hats off to anyone who can take this further and find a solution that wipes them out entirely across the full spectrum of possible speedsā¦ As for me, being a less ambitious pragmatist, I think I now know enough that I can better avoid them in the current generation of hardware, and thatās something I can put to use right away. Win-win-win all the way around. 
If 