Hot off the 3D Printer
Filamental Fluke
I have always felt I am an extremely lucky person (which is why I will NEVER try gambling) & this luck manifested into a free, top of the range, sexy as hell 3D printer.
My cousin, a very cool and successful nerd, was moving back to the US and thus had to cull some of his belongings. One of the things that didn’t make the cut was the Bambu X1 Carbon, and so he left it with me. This lead to a renewed fascination with 3D printing. I’d been following creators like MakeAnything, Makers Muse and others for years, but was intimidated by the seemingly endless variables that could cause a print to fail. Instead of a tool for making, 3D printing is itself a craft. Understanding filament, extrusion, heat, speed, X, Y - blah blah, it was too much! Plus, I already have way too many hobbies.
Enter: the Bambu X1 Carbon. This printer is designed specifically to relieve as much of that fiddly bullshit as possible. The target market is noobs like me: gadget-y people who don’t want to dedicate their entire lives to making a print work. This thing is so freaking smart, no wonder it became an overnight sensation in the community and set the standard for printers going forward.
Why is it so good?
I mentioned the fiddly bullshit, so lets get into it.
3D printers work by pushing plastic through a heated chamber, melting it just enough and extruding it into a shape. The ‘extrusion head’ moves around to different positions on the X & Z axis to extrude a little baby layer of plastic and, once that layer is done, the nozzle will move up a layer (Y axis) and print the next one on top. They call this additive manufacturing because you’re literally adding material, no points for creativity there. Already what we have here is about a billion possible points of failure - if the surface that you’re printing on isn’t perfectly flat and level (yes, two different things) your layers will be messed up and your print is gonna turn out janky. Think Princess and the Pea, one little lump under the mattresses caused her to whinge and moan and annoyed everyone around her. You might think from that story that the princess is a total bitch and you’d be right, the same can be said for 3D printers. The previous meta for levelling your bed (printing surface) was to manually adjust screws on each corner so that the extrusion nozzle was “the width of a piece of paper” away from the bed - that’s some fiddly bullshit. Bambu were like: “Hey, put that piece of paper back in the 2D printer where it belongs” and implemented a self-bed-leveling-system. AKA a huge relief for nerds everywhere.
Next in the line of possible points of failure, your filament. Filament is just a fancy name for plastic string and there are WAY TOO MANY TYPES. Each different type needs its own special temperature, extrusion speed, and warm glass of milk before bed. Here’s where the Bambu really starts to shine; the software that comes with this thing has all the settings for every type of filament you’ll ever need pre-loaded into its computer brain. Just figure out what your filament is called and pat yourself on the back for a job well done.
Okay, you get the idea …
Rapid Fire Time
Wanna take a timelapse of your 3D print? OF COURSE YOU DO
Built in timelapse camera baby
Wanna print in multi colour?
You can - I wouldn’t recommend it, but, yeah it does it automatically.
You’re heading out on the town but need to print some stuff?
Live video feed to the printer
Auto spaghetti-failure detection (it stops itself if the print gets fucked up)
Remote control the printer from an app on your phone
No CAD skills? No problem.
Just drag and drop an STL into the slicer, or (even easier) choose something from the Bambu print library in the app and just press print.
I’ve been having a ball playing with this printer, this really is such a powerful technology and making it more accessible increases that power exponentially. I made a video documenting some of the highs and lows of my first week of prints linked below.