3D Printing is Fun!

As a seethingly jealous ender 3 peasant who is still spending most of his time keeping my printer working with kludges and duct tape; it's nice to know Bambu owners are human after all and still run into problems.

Hope you get it sorted and are back printing soon! 🖖

Manged to get an ender 3V2 a few years ago, auto bed levelling is a must have feature if you intend to spend more time using your printer than calibrating or fixing it. After that masking tape fixes all adhesion problems.
- I eventually turned off auto bed leveling because it just doesn’t help much. You still have to manually level the bed, and the correction it adds is kinda negligible. At least the BL Touch does help with the manual leveling process.
- I must have been lucky with my Ender 3 - I only leveled it every few weeks or less. Very solid printer, had it 5 years.
- After that masking tape fixes all adhesion problems.
  
  Well except the one where the print is TOO stuck to the masking tape. I guess that's less of an issue if you have a magnetic build plate though. I'm still printing on a old flashforge clone. and removing things can sometimes be a pain in the butt.
Haha, my ender is printing at 20mm/s to avoid slippage, with the bed scraper jammed into to filament guide to make it actually grab and feed, and at 105% extrusion, but it's still chugging along. After a few restarts to get the fan spinning, that it.
I feel you - I ran an Ender 3 for 5 years but now I have an A1 and honestly don't miss all the endless tinkering. Learned a hell of a lot in the process. No complaints about the Ender, it was a rock solid machine - now it has a new life as a laser engraver, courtesy of the Creality 1.6w laser attachment which works nice.
Your fuck up is buying an ender...lol Every problem thread in this sub is about a shit ender
- 👍
- Needlessly asshole-ish.

I've had 3 blobs over the years, all caused by an otherwise benign issue turned into that because filament got caught in a silicon sock.

I mean putting a lot of sticky stuff in a sock will usually do that.

I've been doing 3D printing regularly for a decade or so now... Never had a blob.

I've been printing for two weeks, and I had one.
- Apparently the A1 mini is supposed to have a mode to detect this a You just have to enable it.

I don't think it's supposed to do that

that looks like delicious taffy. like an abba zaba

Nozzle not seated properly?

or no nozzle?
I just had this happen too and it was caused by a bad z-offset reading. The nozzle hooked one of the parts on the bed that came loose and drug it around while forming the blob.
- How did you diagnose that?

If you use OctoPrint you can get plugins that use a camera to watch for failed prints like stinging etc and it will stop the print if it fails.

I forget the name of the plugins right now. I went to say “Dr” something.

It used to be Spaghetti Detective, but they wanted to be trendy so it's "Obico" I think now lol
- Thanks for adding the extra detail.
  
  I have since noticed OP has only been printing two weeks so perhaps they don’t want to go down this route just yet, but it is another fun project and they will need to print some things to hold the web cam etc so could be something to focus on.

I had this happen. Pop the whole hotend in the oven on the warm/hold setting for a bit and it should come off fairly easily.

Careful not to break the heating assembly thermostat wires. They're super delicate, and I managed to break them when removing a blob from my mini a while back.

I've run into adhesion problems when the room gets colder.

works 99% of the time, but when ambient temp goes below 70°F everything starts failing.

Yeah, in some parts of the world, a box surrounding the printer isn't really a luxury.

Haven't had problems since I upgraded.

Controlling temperature is important on FDM.
Interesting. All of my prints that failed were running overnight when the temperature dropped.
- What temps are you running your bed at?

I've a massive blob like this one time when the nozzle got clogged and the extruder created enough pressure to push the filament through the threads of the hotend block. It was on an Anet A8 and I ripped a lead off the thermistor trying to get the plastic off so I ended up replacing the entire hotend.

You can try to heat up the hotend to a fair bit under the melting point of the filament to where it's soft and somewhat pliable but not runny or sticky and then trying to peel it off. Though you'd risk damaging any leads to the thermistor, heater, or your hands if you're not careful.

Good luck on fixing the printer and getting back to printing again. 3D printing is a really time consuming hobby

Thanks. I am really frustrated with myself for letting this happen. Pulled everything apart and recovered most of everything, but managed to damage the clip that holds the extruder in place, so now I get to learn how to do surgery and replace the entire assembly. I wish I had gotten a bit more time before having to do a major repair...

OH NO

Hey, ummm... I think I see the problem. Your printer has diarrhea

Atleast it didnt get wedged in the heat sink... Thats what happeneed to my last blob, had to replace the entire hot end.

I had that happen once. it just bout pushed the fan off the head since the clips are broken but it fits good enough™️

I have yet to get one of these fun blobs. 🤞

Getting a regular jam is a PITA in the X1C…having to disassemble the entire hotend to the gears and then pry the stuck filament out of the guide takes a long while. I’ve had an unfortunate number of jams.

I don't see a beginning of a print anywhere, did it not even manage to do the first layer?

If that's the case, a word of advice to always be present for the first 2 layers of your prints, at least for the longer ones.

I didn't take the photo immediately - tried cleaning a bit before it occurred to me to document it.

Aren't these closed hardware? good luck finding replacements parts

looks at all the replacement parts that came with both my Bambu printers and the extra nozzles I ordered at the same time

What are you even talking about?
- Did they include a new hotend or can you get one? I look on their site and see nothing for that.
  
  Edit: I looked under Spare Parts and they weren't there, but I see them under Accessories. And for $13, I'd sure as hell buy one when I got the printer. Along with a bunch of other parts, they're quite reasonably priced.
It might not be cheap (or maybe it is, I dunno) but replacement parts are available. https://eu.store.bambulab.com/en-se/collections/spare-parts-for-a1-series

There is also a chance that they can rescue it without replacing anything, but it will very likely be quite time consuming and they will have to be careful to not damage anything.

This also doesn't look too bad.
- These nozzles are cheap. And it shouldn't be very difficult fix this one if you have a heat gun. The hard part will be to get at the latch that holds the the nozzle assembly in the extruder. That's small, fiddly, and delicate part that there is a good chance of breaking.
  
  So while you are ordering that spare heater assembly, ($20US) you might as well get a new nozzle too, ($10US).
- I just had this happen on my X1C for the same reason and was able to get it off after heating up the hotend for a minute and wiggling it loose. Zero residual damage.
They have all the parts available on their site.
- Until they decide not to sell these anymore
You don't need to replace anything to fix this, though.