Custom Bottle Clamp, continued This was by far the most ambitious 3d printing project I’ve done this far.
Take a look at the list of small prototype shapes I went thru before finalizing:
After all the tweaking, got a solid final design.
And then it was off to my printer.
But you may have noticed, the printer has changed!
This is part of the long delay since my last post.
I went for a deal on the Bambu Labs A1 with the AMS lite. While my first printer, the Creality Ender 3 V2, is an excellent starter machine, and I am grateful for having started with it, the Bambu Labs is the complete other end of the spectrum, and I love it.
As I mentioned before, the Creality machine was great because it forces you to understand all the concepts AND physical device mechanisms involved in 3d printing.
Bambu Labs philosophy is more like--great, you’ve learned that, and now let us take care of all that for you. I love the cloud printing, as my printer is in my shop, away from my computer. When things go wrong, the alerts are appropriate, accurate, and generally easy to fix. The speed is about 17 billion times faster, as it is Klipper based. I almost laughed the first time it started printing, in comparison to the Creality--I get whole projects printed in the time the Creality machine is still leveling the bed.
As a little informal and probably not entirely accurate explanation--earlier generation 3d printers are based on the Marlin format--which refers to the set of soft, firm, and hardware setup that is used to move the printer head and XY plate, such that the filament is extruded at the exact right time and place. As you might imagine this is crucial because these things are accurate to 0.1mm! Part of Marlin are SPEED LIMITS, because the acceleration and deceleration of the head will throw off the accuracy.
The newer generation of printers coming out now are Klipper based. This set of soft, firm, and hardware sort of approaches it differently. Basically, it is more like “I am a damn computer and I can do maths.” So it will actually calculate in the effects of acceleration and deceleration, rather than speed limit it.
Anyway, the first time I started printing with the Bambu Labs A1, it was actually laugh out loud ridiculously faster.
There is a bit of a learning curve also. In particular the software, Bambu slicer, looks a lot different than the universal Cura Slicer. It also seems to work so much better, as I assume it is actually tested and vetted by Bambu Labs. One new thing that works really well are tree supports. Supports are temporary breakaway supports generated by the Slicer program to support things, duh--most notably support things that have nothing underneath them ie overhangs. Remember, liquified filament is extruded from a tip, and thus, if there is nothing underneath, the melted plastic will just fall out of the air. Tree supports are a type of support system that look like trees--they work really well and are easy to break off.
