Using small amounts of material with AMS?

[Jonathan_K]

I just got back from a trade show recently where Prusa was giving out samples of Prusament in ~25g coils, and I previously got a variety pack of PETGs and PLAs from Protopasta.

This got me thinking, what’s the best way to use these with my Bambu?

Given the way the AMS uses the forward & back-driving sensing on the spools to make sure filament isn’t going problematically, I spooled them up on some full-size spools, but my concern is that if the “tail” isn’t adequately anchored they’ll come loose and the AMS will be very confused when they don’t retract like a normal spool would.

My hope is to use the odds and ends up on things like these Pikachus, where it’s a trivial amount of filament needed to make for red cheeks and black ear tips and a sample is just the thing.

Anyone else have suggestions & ideas on how best to use up samples and leftovers?

[DzzD]

With AMS there is an option to switch to another spool when one is finished while printing, so you can start your print with a spool nearly finished and it will continue on the new one (must be set as same material and same color)

[dana.nelson]

There should be no problem starting a print with that small amount respooled to feed in the AMS, but watch out for the end of spool behavior I started a discussion on here recently:

End of Roll Filament Purge Behavior

I do not remember seeing this behavior discussed, but I found today that if your print job finishes where the spool has run out in the AMS but filament is still present in the Bowden tube path to the extruder, the printer will purge the entire amount in the tubes as large poops until the path is clear since it cannot be retracted. For me where I have AMSs located under the table the printer is sitting on, this can make for a lot of poop to clear out of a long tube path. I would like to see an o…

[Domoson]

What I do with sample filament (20g-200g) mostly around 50g is the standard for samples. Load them in the back with a printed sample spool. When it runs out, the Bambu will pause the print. Then load another. Easy peezy. I never spool 20g on a 1k spool and put it in the AMS. Asking for trouble. Don’t over complicate things.

[Jonathan_K]

@Domoson The problem here is that doesn’t let me do multi-material with lots of small samples where it makes sense to use them for different details (like I showed with this batch of Pikachu)

I’ll have to pick some bigger prints that I don’t care about color on

[Jonathan_K]

@dana.nelson This is a good point, and a good reason to keep AMS travel distances short!

I currently have mine in the standard on-top configuration, but am planning to add a second in the future, and will be be putting the printers as a 2-stack next to the printer to keep the travels short.