I don’t get, why is there no support material without spool available?
Over the time, I got more and more spools. This is just a waste of material.
It would be nice if really any filament could be ordered without a spool.
I’m bumping this because there is still no change regarding the senseless mandatory purchase of spools for this and other filaments. No one needs a spool every time they order support material or other materials. Why isn’t every material generally available as a refill?
Because it doesn’t make sense?
Refills are a good option for high usage filaments like PLAs and PETGs.
The support material is the furthest thing from a high usage material - it’s literally only used for the interface layer between supports and the actual part. It’s never supposed to be used for the full supports themselves.
I’m a heavy user of my H2 and X1C, and in nearly two years I’ve managed to use a total of 94 grams out of my original 500 gram spool - less than 20%. I expect that’s actually above average for users, we see very little discussion of these filaments on the board in general. Additionally, since it’s been discovered that PLA is a great interface for PETG and PETG is a great interface for PLA, most people are just using those materials instead.
The business reality is that there is always cost to more SKUs. Every unique item needs dedicated space in warehouses, you need to maintain stock levels for each item, you need to register the UPC annually for each item, and for a global business that gets very expensive very quickly.
The other side of this is ensuring a good user experience. You’ll notice that the only filaments available as refills are ones that can be dried at low temperatures - on a light grey spool. Putting a high temp filament refill on a light grey spool and trying to dry it at the correct temperature will cause the spool to deform, meaning it won’t feed properly in an AMS. At minimum this would requiring a risky spool transfer, but typically would require a respooling - if the filament can be salvaged at all. Considering the higher temp filaments are also the most expensive, it’s easy to see why Bambu made this choice. If you spend any amount of time looking at other manufacturers, you’ll see they aren’t selling their high temp materials as refills, either.
PPA-CF and PPS-CF aren’t even on reusable spools at all - they need to be dried at higher temperatures than the dark grey spools can withstand.
“Senseless”. 