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What I learned from the first few months with a Bambu Lab A1 3D printer, part 1

    Bambu Studio is not the most approachable application, but if you have taken it that far, it should not be completely outside your understanding. For the first installation, choose your printer model (all Bambu models and a healthy selection of external printers are officially supported), leave the filament settings as they are and log in if you want to use the Bambu cloud services. These sync printer settings and keep track of the models that you store and download at Makerworld, but a non-cloud LAN mode is available for the Bambu sceptics and privacy-conscious.

    For every newbie, very All you have to do is connect your printer, a .3mf or. STL file that you have downloaded from Makerworld or elsewhere, select your filament in the drop-down menu, click “Slice plate” and then click “Print”. Things such as the standard 0.4 mm mouthpiece format and the recorded PEI building plate from Bambu have already been charged, although you may have to check these selections when you open a file for the first time.

    When you cut your building plate for the first time, the app spits back a stack of numbers. There are two important for 3D printing neophytes to follow. One is the “total filament” figure, which you tell how many grams of filament the printer will use to make your model (filament usually comes in 1 kg, and the printer will generally not follow use for you, so if you want to prevent you from getting up in the middle of the work, you can keep track of what you use). The second is the “total time” figure that you tell how long the entire print will last from the first calibration steps to the end of the task.

    The most important way to tweak the print quality is to adjust the height of the layers that the A1 lays.

    Andrew Cunningham

    Adding some extra infill can add some strength to prints, although 15 percent usually give a considerable amount of strength without the filament too superfluous.

    Andrew Cunningham

    When selecting a filament, people who adhere to Bambu's First-Party-Spoelen have the easiest time, because optimal settings have already been programmed in the app. But I have had almost zero problems with the “generic” presets and the coils of generic filament in the interior that I have bought from our local micro center, at least when holding PLA (polylactic acid, the most common and generally the easiest of the different types of filament that you can buy). But we dive deeper into plastics in part 2 of this series.