I had about given up with it, but since hearing so much about the speed and performance of Bambu Lab printers, I’m back in!
I mean the speed alone, I’m getting about 21mm^3 of plastic pushed per second on my A1s, and the accuracy, even at that speed.
When I do mating parts I keep having to lower my tolerances or they are loose. I used to have to do 0.4mm, then I tried 0.2mm and now I’m on 0.1mm gaps.
The ZAX I’m going to be bringing to Iowa utilize a 3d printed, double wall unibody, upon which I’m going to build laminate layers of fine sand.
I’ll start putting pics in here if the design work and the prints shortly
I’m still rocking my Prusa i3 MKs+, but only for utilitarian parts. Never got good enough with it to make parts I was happy looking at. Just went to a local vendor fair though where people were selling 3D printed multi-color toy figures and was very impressed with the quality of the prints. Have the newer machines improved a lot in the last few years?
Yes, they really have. Exciting to think what the next steps are going to be for the technology.
20 years ago when I was in tech school I visited a rapid prototyping outfit and they had two 3D printers - one used regular printer ink and some kind of powder. The three axis head would move over the powder and squirt ink. Yielded very rough models. The other used some type of atomized acetate and two lasers would converge on a point (I may be wrong about this process - been awhile) and cook it solid. It created much more robust parts that could be moved, for example they had a door knob they printed for us to ogle.
I imagine this shop is long gone since the advent of affordable equipment and software has flooded the market.
Back almost 40 years ago the college I went to (Milwaukee School of Engineering) had some new rapid prototype technology. It was cellulose (paper slury) based. I remember the instructor being amazed that it could produce a fitment proto part in about 18 hours vs 80 hours of machining for a metal part. That was back when a 286 was the hot shit for personal PC’s.
I should add that both of those processes took forever relatively speaking compared to today, but light years faster than prototyping injection molding or machine shop setup time.
When my daughter went to high school, we enrolled her in an alternative school that has a strong STEM component. They gave away 3D printed keychains on day one, and that was almost ten years ago now.
Yes, the printers are much better. Many of the new printers have advanced bed leveling better heat control and innertia compensation/calibration offering more consistant prints with less input from the user. The newest batch of printers “just print”, meaning out of the box they can print without any other setup work.
Yeah, I was shocked when my Ender 3 V3 didn’t need any tweaking at all. Quite a difference from my original Ender from 2018. That one needed some adjustments before parts would even stick on a regular basis.
I would second this, with the caveat that Bambu support can be hit or miss. I do like their guides a lot though, which kind of alleviates that problem.
I also agree with Bambu Lab, but I’m going with the more affordable open-air A1 model as I want to assemble a small fleet of, say, 8 for my projects.
If there is one knock against the brand IMO, it is that they are very much trying to keep their software and such closed source, and open source projects such as Orca Slicer are always fighting to keep access to the hardware.
