First off, I love mine. I’m a life long bed slinger naysayer, and the Bambu checks all the boxes for me. I’ve already got a few kit/diy printers, and the open it and start printing aspect has been a boon to my personal and our team usage of 3d printing. 401 also has a Markforged Onyx Pro, although the horribly long print times, and arguably over inflated material costs, limit our usage of it.
I preordered a X1 Carbon Combo back in early November, and got it right at the end of Nov. Also got one of each of the extruders, and bed plates along with some spares. Parts are just so cheap it’s hard not to buy 3x at a time. Whole extruder assembly’s are $30! We almost entirely use the Bambu PEI bed plate, and as long as you keep it clean with dawn and hot water, everything sticks well and pops right off with a flex of the plate.
We’ve been printing PETG almost entirely, along with 1-2 rolls of ABS, a small amount of PLA, and some other more niche filaments. We’ve had zero issue with the 20-30KG of PETG we’ve printed so far, both on .4 and .6mm. We like petg as it has decent strength and pretty low cost. As for brands, honestly I just buy what I see on sale via 3dprintingdeals, which has included HZST3D, KINLUOT, Geeetech, and GiantArm, all the normal cheap filament companies. No issues whatsoever with any of them.
We’ve also used CC3D Polycarbonate, GiantArm TPU, PRILINE PC-CF, Polymaker PA6-CF, and iSANGHU PETG-CF. All without issue, although I wouldn’t necessarily say they are on par with Onyx as we haven’t done any side by side testing. Although Bambu’s new PAHT-CF looks really good, but we haven’t had a need for it. The .6 hardened nozzle is great for the CF filaments, and I haven’t had any clogs or the like so far. The TPU is as finicky as it would be on any printer, but there’s some bambu subreddit posts with great settings.
I’ll say if you’re just using the generic profiles, automatic flow calibration, and not aiming for perfection, parts are a solid 8.5/10 in quality. You can very easily get that last 1.5 if you get into the weeds and do a small amount of custom tuning for each brand and type of filament, as you would with any other printer. There’s a fork of the Bambu slicer, OrcaSlicer (formerly SoftFever) that has some built in calibration models and tools, as well as unlock all the settings across the board. We honestly haven’t had time or motivation to go much beyond the generic material profiles, and we just really haven’t needed to. since they work great as is.
One note on automatic flow cal, it’s not supposed to be used on the textured PEI bed, although it does work, it messes a little with the feed forward and makes seams more pronounced. Once we switched to doing the cal on a smooth bed, seams cleaned up immensely.
I can’t comment on speeds with actual numbers, as again we’ve just used defaults, but I’ll say it’s at least 2-3x faster than generic ender3’s, and 5+x faster than the Markforged.
The only service issue we’ve really had is that the belts started to wear in/stretch with the first 3 months of use, and I had to do the belt tensioning procedure. We noticed some holes coming out ovular, and the belt procedure takes less than five minutes to completely fix it. Otherwise things like nozzle swaps are crazy fast, just two bolts. If you get an AMS print out this guy, super helpful. Build quality is rock solid in my opinion, just make sure you put it on something stable because it moves QUICK.
Additionally, no matter which model you get, I cannot recommend the AMS enough. The automatic material failover in itself is so helpful to burn up those last few bits of spools. Plus multi-color is really neat. You do have to rewind or print the guards for cardboard spools, but that’s not a huge deal, and the Hydra AMS mod help a big with weird sized spools.
Feel free to ask any questions, I think I covered everything in this little brain dump.
