3d printer

595 Articles

The Saga Of Hacking A Bambu X1 Carbon

September 7, 2025 by 34 Comments

Bambu Labs make indisputably excellent printers. However, that excellence comes at the cost of freedom. After a firmware release earlier this year, Bambu printers could only work with Bambu’s own slicer. For [Proper Printing], this was unacceptable, so printer modification was in order. 

First on the plate was the pesky Bambu Labs nozzle. They are a pain to replace, and specialty sizes like 1.8mm are nonexistent. To remedy this flaw, a Bambu Labs compatible heat sink, an E3D V6 ring heater, and a heat break assembly are required. The ring heater was needed for clearance with the stock Bambu shroud. With the help of a 3D-printed jig, fresh holes were cut and tapped into the heat sink to make room for the E3D heat break. Some crimping to salvaged connectors and a bit of filing on the heat sink for wire routing, and Bob’s your uncle!

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A preproduction U1 sitting on a workbench

A Tool-changing 3D Printer For The Masses

August 27, 2025 by 26 Comments

Modern multi-material printers certainly have their advantages, but all that purging has a way to add up to oodles of waste. Tool-changing printers offer a way to do multi-material prints without the purge waste, but at the cost of complexity. Plastic’s cheap, though, so the logic has been that you could never save enough on materials cost to make up for the added capital cost of a tool-changer — that is, until now.

Currently active on Kickstarter, the Snapmaker U1 promises to change that equation. [Albert] got his hands on a pre-production prototype for a review on 247Printing, and what we see looks promising.

The printer features the ubiquitous 235 mm x 235 mm bed size — pretty much the standard for a printer these days, but quite a lot smaller than the bed of what’s arguably the machine’s closest competition, the tool-changing Prusa XL. On the other hand, at under one thousand US dollars, it’s one quarter the price of Prusa’s top of the line offering. Compared to the XL, it’s faster in every operation, from heating the bed and nozzle to actual printing and even head swapping. That said, as you’d expect from Prusa, the XL comes dialed-in for perfect prints in a way that Snapmaker doesn’t manage — particularly for TPU. You’re also limited to four tool heads, compared to the five supported by the Prusa XL.

The U1 is also faster in multi-material than its price-equivalent competitors from Bambu Lab, up to two to three times shorter print times, depending on the print. It’s worth noting that the actual print speed is comparable, but the Snapmaker takes the lead when you factor in all the time wasted purging and changing filaments.

The assisted spool loading on the sides of the machine uses RFID tags to automatically track the colour and material of Snapmaker filament. That feature seems to take a certain inspiration from the Bambu Labs Mini-AMS, but it is an area [Albert] identifies as needing particular attention from Snapmaker. In the beta configuration he got his hands on, it only loads filament about 50% of the time. One can only imagine the final production models will do better than that!

In spite of that, [Albert] says he’s backing the Kickstarter. Given Snapmaker is an established company — we featured an earlier Snapmaker CNC/Printer/Laser combo machine back in 2021— that’s less of a risk than it could be.

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3D-Printing A Full-Sized Kayak In Under A Day

August 12, 2025 by 25 Comments

If you want to get active out on the water, you could buy a new kayak, or hunt one down on Craigslist, Or, you could follow [Ivan Miranda]’s example, and print one out instead.

[Ivan] is uniquely well positioned to pursue a build like this. That’s because he has a massive 3D printer which uses a treadmill as a bed. It’s perfect for building long, thin things, and a kayak fits the bill perfectly. [Ivan] has actually printed a kayak before, but it took an excruciating 7 days to finish. This time, he wanted to go faster. He made some extruder tweaks that would allow his treadmill printer to go much faster, and improved the design to use as much of the belt width as possible. With the new setup capable of extruding over 800 grams of plastic per hour, [Ivan] then found a whole bunch of new issues thanks to the amount of heat involved. He steps through the issues one at a time until he has a setup capable of extruding an entire kayak in less than 24 hours.

This isn’t just a dive into 3D printer tech, though. It’s also about watercraft! [Ivan] finishes the print with a sander and a 3D pen to clean up some imperfections. The body is also filled with foam in key areas, and coated with epoxy to make it watertight. It’s not the easiest craft to handle, and probably isn’t what you’d choose for ocean use. It’s too narrow, and wounds [Ivan] when he tries to get in. It might be a floating and functional kayak, just barely, for a smaller individual, but [Ivan] suggests he’ll need to make changes if he were to actually use this thing properly.

Overall, it’s a project that shows you can 3D print big things quite quickly with the right printer, and that maritime engineering principles are key for producing viable watercraft. Video after the break.

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Continuous-Path 3D Printed Case Is Clearly Superior

August 12, 2025 by 9 Comments

[porchlogic] had a problem. The desire was to print a crystal-like case for an ESP32 project, reminiscent of so many glorious game consoles and other transparent hardware of the 1990s. However, with 3D printing the only realistic option on offer, it seemed difficult to achieve a nice visual result. The solution? Custom G-code to produce as nice a print as possible, by having the hot end trace a single continuous path.

The first job was to pick a filament. Transparent PLA didn’t look great, and was easily dented—something [porchlogic] didn’t like given the device was intended to be pocketable. PETG promised better results, but stringing was common and tended to reduce the visual appeal. The solution to avoid stringing would be to stop the hot end lifting away from the print and moving to different areas of the part. Thus, [porchlogic] had to find a way to make the hot end move in a single continuous path—something that isn’t exactly a regular feature of common 3D printing slicer utilities.

The enclosure itself was designed from the ground up to enable this method of printing. Rhino and Grasshopper were used to create the enclosure and generate the custom G-code for an all-continuous print. Or, almost—there is a single hop across the USB port opening, which creates a small blob of plastic that is easy to remove once the print is done, along with strings coming off the start and end points of the print.

Designing an enclosure in this way isn’t easy, per se, but it did net [porchLogic] the results desired. We’ve seen some other neat hacks in this vein before, too, like using innovative non-planar infill techniques to improve the strength of prints.

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The Trials Of Trying To Build An Automatic Filament Changer

August 11, 2025 by 16 Comments

Running out of filament mid-print is a surefire way to ruin your parts and waste a lot of time. [LayerLab] was sick of having this problem, and so sought to find a proper solution. Unfortunately, between off-the-shelf solutions and homebrew attempts, he was unable to solve the problem to his satisfaction.

[LayerLab] had a simple desire. He wanted his printer to swap to a second spool of filament when the first one runs out, without ruining or otherwise marring the print. It sounds simple, but the reality is more complicated. As an Australian, he couldn’t access anything from InfinityFlow, so he first attempted to use the “auto refill” features included on the Bambu Labs AMS 2. However, it would routinely make filament changes in outside wall areas of a print, leaving unsightly marks and producing poorer quality parts.

His next effort was to use the Wisepro Auto Refill Filament Buffer. It’s a feeder device that takes filament from two spools, and starts feeding the backup spool in to your printer when the primary spool runs out. Unfortunately, [LayerLab] had a cavalcade of issues with the device. It would routinely feed from the secondary spool when there was still primary filament available, jamming the device, and it didn’t come with a proper mounting solution to work with consumer printers. It also had bearings popping out the top of the housing. Attempts to rework the device into a larger twin-spool rig helped somewhat, but ultimately the unreliability of the Wisepro when changing from one spool to another meant it wasn’t fit for purpose. Its feeder motors were also to trigger the filament snag cutters that [LayerLab] had included in his design.

Ultimately, the problem remains unsolved for [LayerLab]. They learned a lot along the way, mostly about what not to do, but they’re still hunting for a viable automatic filament changer solution that suits their needs. Filament sensors help, but can only do so much. If you reckon you know the answer, or a good way forward, share your thoughts in the comments. Video after the break.

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Open Source 5-Axis Printer Has Its Own Slicer

August 4, 2025 by 21 Comments

Three-axis 3D printing has been with us long enough that everybody knows the limitations, but so far, adding extra axes has been very much a niche endeavor. [Daniel] at Fractal Robotics wants to change that, with the Fractal 5 Pro 5-axis printer, and its corresponding Fractal Cortex slicer.

The printer looks like an extra-beefy Voron from a distance, which is no surprise as [Daniel] admits to taking heavy inspiration from the Voron Trident. The Fractal 5 shares a core-XY geometry with the Voron, using beefy 30 mm x 30 mm extrusions. Also like the Voron, it runs Klipper on a Raspberry Pi hiding in the base. Under a standard-looking printhead using a BondTech extruder and E3D volcano hotend, we find the extra two axes hiding under the circular build plate. The B axis is a gantry that can pivot the build plate assembly a full 90 degrees; the A axis spins the plate without limit thanks to the slip rings built into the design.

The extruder may look fairly normal, but it has actually been designed very carefully to allow the nozzle to get as close as possible to the build plate when the B-axis is at 90 degrees. It looks like the E3D hotend is actually the limiting factor there, which gives plenty of design freedom when planning prints in the accompanying Fractal Cortex slicer.

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A 3D printer is in the process of printing a test piece. The printer has two horizontal linear rails at right angles to each other, with cylindrical metal rods mounted horizontally on the rails, so that the rods cross over the print bed. The print head slides along these rods.

An Open-Concept 3D Printer Using Cantilever Arms

July 12, 2025 by 14 Comments

If you’re looking for a more open, unenclosed 3D printer design than a cubic frame can accommodate, but don’t want to use a bed-slinger, you don’t have many options. [Boothy Builds] recently found himself in this situation, so he designed the Hi5, a printer that holds its hotend between two cantilevered arms.

The hotend uses bearings to slide along the metal arms, which themselves run along linear rails. The most difficult part of the design was creating the coupling between the guides that slides along the arms. It had to be rigid enough to position the hotend accurately and repeatably, but also flexible enough avoid binding. The current design uses springs to tension the bearings, though [Boothy Builds] eventually intends to find a more elegant solution. Three independent rails support the print bed, which lets the printer make small alterations to the bed’s tilt, automatically tramming it. Earlier iterations used CNC-milled bed supports, but [Boothy Builds] found that 3D printed plastic supports did a better job of damping out vibrations.

[Boothy Builds] notes that the current design puts the X and Y belts under considerable load, which sometimes causes them to slip, leading to occasional layer shifts and noise in the print. He acknowledges that the design still has room for improvement, but the design seems quite promising to us.

This printer’s use of cantilevered arms to support the print head puts it in good company with another interesting printer we’ve seen. Of course, that design element does also lend itself to the very cheapest of printers.

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