What is this problem?

[aduck]

Hi I’m printing the handle for my Foxbat Sillybutts blaster and I noticed that there is really bad ghosting. Is this normal?

[OTpandy1]

No this is not normal. Have you got filament flow calibration on?

[aduck]

Yeah, I’m using Esun PLA+

[BambuBanker]

@Olias could probably help you the best but have you dried your filament and tried slowing down the print?

[aduck]

Yeah I dried my filament, but I haven’t tried slowing it down, It does have like %40 in-fill though so that might be a problem. I just wanted to see if there was anything major I was doing wrong.

Thank you so much for your help @OTpandy1 @BambuBanker . I feel really happy when people are nicer on this forum, bit too much arguing. Lol

[Olias]

I normally don’t follow A1 troubleshooting posts because I own a P1 and I have the A1 forums blocked from my list for the purposes of decluttering. However, @BambuBanker tagged me on this and it flagged this post so I’ll do my best based on my P1 experience. So keep in mind that difference when I make suggestions.

The banding that appears here could be caused by a number of issues. While it’s impossible to say from a photo, one could take some educated guesses. There are some first steps that should be ruled out.

1. Maintenance procedure – Based on your join date to the forum, I’m guessing you haven’t had the printer for very long so wear and tear are probably not a factor but poor factory lubrication could be. Make sure you check the wiki on this and follow the procedure for cleaning and lubricating. A1 Maintenance Guidelines | Bambu Lab Wiki

2. Vibration Compensation – This would be my #1 suspected cause based on the photo. It is covered in the belt tensioning wiki. I would just rerun the vibration compensation tuning and auto bed leveling simply to rule out anything related to faulty sensor feedback. It’s rare but it does happen. A1 Belt Tensioning | Bambu Lab Wiki
   

   

3. Filament moisture – Yes, I know you said you dried it. But is it dry? The only way to know that it is dry is to weigh it before and after drying to confirm the presence and then absence of moisture. It’s important to rule this out.

4. PTFE feed or filament roller snagging – The banding could also be explained if there wasn’t smooth feeding of the spool. Are you running this through and AMS and if so have you tried to eliminate the AMS and feed this as a solitary spool? If there is a feed issue in any of the filament path, it’s important to isolate each system while you diagnose.

5. Filament calibration – Did you manually calibrate the filament using the Orca Slicer built-in calibration utilities? The Bambu Studio utilities are pretty poor. They copied some of them from Orca but Orca still leads in this area. Calibration · SoftFever/OrcaSlicer Wiki · GitHub

Other diagnostic steps

Whenever I experience something that looks off, I go back to basics and try to create a test scenario that allows me to isolate the behavior. The best thing of course is to figure out the “Why”. But sometimes that can be elusive. However, that doesn’t mean one can’t “tune” the problem away or at least mitigate it even of the root cause is never found.

Here are a couple of diagnostic steps that helped in the past.

1. Basic Primitives Test – Using the primitive tool, print a simple cube and simple cylinder. First verify that you can get a smooth print using those shapes before you waste a lot of time and filament. Right-Click on an empty plate and select them from the menu. You can leave it at the default size but try making them smaller for quicker prints. As an example I like to use a 25x10x10mm cube because it’s 1/3 the amount of filament. Theses two shapes will reveal any calibration or flow problems if that is the cause.
   
   

2. Testing defects in the model itself – If the cube and cylinder primitives print well, sometimes the model could be at fault. It may be that the way it is constructed will print fine with one filament and produce a very different result from another spool and type from the same manufacturer. We’ve seen enough examples here of difference between PLA batches from Bambu itself. Using the (c) tool, cut your model into a smaller section for the same reasons we used a primitive. You want to get a test object small enough to reproduce the problem. Keep cutting it down in halves until its small enough to reproduce the problem but not use too much filament.
   

   
   
   Make sure you correct for non-manifold edges if that warning pops up
   
   
   
   
   
   

3. Speed – You mentioned you hadn’t tried to reduce speed yet. However, If your flow ratio or max volumetric speed is miscalibrated, reducing speed by running the model in “quiet mode” is a single-click test that will double print time but might provide some diagnostic data. To me, all this does is rule in or rule out flow issues. It’s more of a band-aid in this case as opposed to a remedy but worth trying out as a diagnostic step.

[aduck]

WOW, thank you. I will try most of that,
I lubricated all of the rails just a week ago, and ran vibration compensation very recently, I think it might just be the fact that it’s a bed slinger too.