Hi there! I’m a “Senior” maker with 30 years of experience and a huge fan of 3D printing. I’ve been into it for 10 years and I’m now on my fifth printer. Currently, I own a Prusa Mk3, a humble Ender 3 V2, and my latest addition, the Bambulabs A1, which I’ve been using almost daily for the past two months. Overall, the experience has been great.
BUT the honeymoon with the A1 is over. For the third time, the printed part detached from the textured plate mid-print, and the printer kept going, almost destroying itself.
The first time this happened, I broke the thermistor wires trying to remove a massive blob of melted plastic that had backed up behind the hot end. The wires are extremely thin, poorly positioned, and unprotected.
As a designer, I have to say this feels like a design flaw. There should be something preventing melted plastic from backing up into the print head—it can lead to major damage and is a nightmare to clean. Also, the hot end latches are fragile and badly secured. One of mine snapped while I was cleaning up.
A small design change, like a cover behind the nozzle or a tweak to the fan assembly, could probably avoid all of this.
In 10 years working with 3D printers, I’ve NEVER had an issue like this—until the Bambu A1. None of my other printers would suffer from this because there are no “caves” around the hot end for melted plastic to get into. I really hope the BambuLab design team comes up with an updated part to fix this.
I believe they can.
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