My A1 has around 7000 hours on it now and with maintenance nothing major has really popped up. Recently though I’ve noticed a strange ripple around some prints, not like a banding ripple, this is different. The ripples travel up the print on an angle, and when it’s doing the first few layers, you can see a (mostly) even pattern going from left to right.
After checking a few things I noticed the bed has a bit of resistance and I can feel and hear some kind of osculation more near the center, like there was gunk on one of the steel guides/rails, but I’ve cleaned them, re oiled, cleaned the black gunk off the idler, and centered the belt tracking. Outside of taking it all apart and looking for something major inside, is this something as simple as the belt got stretched and needs to be replaced? Really stumped with this one, and not sure how to phrase it looking it up either.
No one else with any issue like this? It’s causing this ripple on almost every single print now… there has to be a solution for this…
Please upload the picture of the artifacts you are seeing. If cleaning up and lubricating rails didn’t help, then the issue is probably in the extrusion. What bed do you use? Textured PEI?
Can you do a single layer test? Right click → Add Cube primitive, resize it to cover the bed and as thick as a single layer is.
Don’t forget to select the correct plate type and do bed mesh leveling.
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I’ve tried with my smooth black PLA only, gold textured PEI, both the BIQU blue plates, all the same issue. There is a noticeably louder travel sound when it moves the bed back quickly, when you move it manually, you can feel it resisting as if there was something stuck to the metal wheel and it’s rolling over it. The base layers you can see a pretty evenly spaced ripple, but as the print moves up, you can see the shift move back and forth. The lower lines on the second picture push out, while the ones above it are sunk in.
Doesn’t matter where things are on the bed, but if I print slower, it’s less noticeable, but still there. This issue seemed to happen overnight, it was pumping out parts just fine, it didn’t feel gradual at all and I keep a close eye on the quality.
Like I said, this printer has a few hours on it and this could likely be something that needs to be replaced, I’ve just never been presented with this specific issue as of yet. I do basic maintenance regularly, but after like 5-6K hour mark I think I need to tear them down and do a full cleaning. 2 of my X1’s are also doing strange things now as well 
I’ve seen others with pictures much like these, but there is never a solution, or at least one anyone bothers to post back about.
Not sure why I labeled this originally as the X axis, but it was the Y (bed) axis that was the issue.
Bambu gave me the standard cut and paste responses even though I clearly stated the steps I’ve gone through and eliminated as a result. I knew this was a physical/mechanical issue, it wasn’t something loose or anything else along those lines, but nonetheless they kept giving me the same nonsense.
I have a local shop that sells Bambu and they handle the warranty stuff or basically any other issues I have. I asked them to just order me a new Y rail assembly, like 3 days later I had it in my hands and it was indeed the issue…
The old rail vibrates and makes noise as you quickly move it back and forth while the new one is damn near silent.
TL;DR
Y rail was pooched, new one 100% solved the issue.
