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CNC / Re: It's new to me
« Last post by ddmckee54 on April 13, 2026, 11:31:08 PM »I had a couple of 3D printing milestones recently, I started printing with something other than PLA and the P1S glitched on me. Although in all honesty I probably made it worse than it should have been.
I decided to try PETG, and I wanted to get the scaling dialed in to correct for shrinkage. I decided that I might as well be printing something useful to do this testing. My new spindle uses an ER11 collet, so I found an STL for a chip fan that presses onto the collet nut. The friendly Google AI said the scaling factor should be 100.3-100.8%, so I scaled the fan to 100.5% and gave it a shot, way too tight. I scaled it to 100.8% and printed it again. It takes less than 1/2 hour to print the fan - including the 7+ minutes the P1S uses for setup on every print. It was still too tight, but I could force it on the nut. I printed it again, this time scaled to 101.5%. It presses onto the nut, not all the way, but since I didn't design the fan I can only guess the designers intentions. I WAS going to print a fan scaled to 102%, but that's when the glitch occurred. I started the print and left to do something else. When I came back about 15 minutes later I had a bird's nest on the print bed. It happens, so I did what I do when the D6 screws up late at night - I shut off the power and went to bed.
When I got up the next day and fired up the printer it was not happy with me, the AMS was making very unhappy noises. I realized that I SHOULD have aborted the print, then shut off the power and gone to bed. Ain't 20/20 hindsight just wondermus though? I realized that the filament had frozen in the extruder and that I needed to get it out of the hot end so the AMS could retract it and be happy again. But, I needed to do that before the AMS was powered up. I decided to try unplugging the AMS, heat up the hot end, and see if I could pull the filament back by hand - to see if that would work. I did, and it did - so I decided to try printing again. All seemed to go well, until it tried starting to print about 50mm above the print bed. All I could do was abort the print and hang my head in shame wondering "What the Hell did I do to this poor machine?" Before I contacted Bambu Labs and confessed my sins, I wanted to run the initial calibration cycle again. I wanted to see if that would let the printer find its' lost marbles.
I'm proud to report that it worked and the plastic pooping robot is now about 7 hours into an 8 hour print. That print will give me the Z axis rail holder, and the bearing block that will slide on those rails.
Don
I decided to try PETG, and I wanted to get the scaling dialed in to correct for shrinkage. I decided that I might as well be printing something useful to do this testing. My new spindle uses an ER11 collet, so I found an STL for a chip fan that presses onto the collet nut. The friendly Google AI said the scaling factor should be 100.3-100.8%, so I scaled the fan to 100.5% and gave it a shot, way too tight. I scaled it to 100.8% and printed it again. It takes less than 1/2 hour to print the fan - including the 7+ minutes the P1S uses for setup on every print. It was still too tight, but I could force it on the nut. I printed it again, this time scaled to 101.5%. It presses onto the nut, not all the way, but since I didn't design the fan I can only guess the designers intentions. I WAS going to print a fan scaled to 102%, but that's when the glitch occurred. I started the print and left to do something else. When I came back about 15 minutes later I had a bird's nest on the print bed. It happens, so I did what I do when the D6 screws up late at night - I shut off the power and went to bed.
When I got up the next day and fired up the printer it was not happy with me, the AMS was making very unhappy noises. I realized that I SHOULD have aborted the print, then shut off the power and gone to bed. Ain't 20/20 hindsight just wondermus though? I realized that the filament had frozen in the extruder and that I needed to get it out of the hot end so the AMS could retract it and be happy again. But, I needed to do that before the AMS was powered up. I decided to try unplugging the AMS, heat up the hot end, and see if I could pull the filament back by hand - to see if that would work. I did, and it did - so I decided to try printing again. All seemed to go well, until it tried starting to print about 50mm above the print bed. All I could do was abort the print and hang my head in shame wondering "What the Hell did I do to this poor machine?" Before I contacted Bambu Labs and confessed my sins, I wanted to run the initial calibration cycle again. I wanted to see if that would let the printer find its' lost marbles.
I'm proud to report that it worked and the plastic pooping robot is now about 7 hours into an 8 hour print. That print will give me the Z axis rail holder, and the bearing block that will slide on those rails.
Don
