Been awhile

It’s been a very long time since I bought a 3D printer. I remember a time when I had nine or ten 3D printers split between both my home and office. At that time I was making and selling a lot of EUC stands via my eucarmy.com online store. Over the years that has declined significantly as has my interest in the hobby. This was another one of them that was tied a lot to Cindy as she would often paint a lot of the cool things I used to make which was kind of a fun symbiotic set up.

Before I moved I sold/gave away a bunch of my printer farm and I have given away a couple more even after I moved. I have still been printing stands to keep a small inventory on hand as well printing things on request for others that ask but not digging into the new models that are always out there. So my buying a new printer is not something I would have predicted several months ago.

The main reason I decided to do so was my friend bought an A1 and has been showing me the cool stuff he has been making on it for quite awhile. It was cool enough to motivate me to splurge and buy myself one in December. Last night I put the printer together which took some time but was not difficult. Bambu really does a nice job making assembly clearly explained and simple. When I took the printer into my office I quickly realized I have a benchtop real estate issue.

Originally I planned to just add the Bambu into the space that currently has two Prusa printers on it. However since the A1 has a stand alone four filament holder it takes up a lot of space. I pulled one of the Prusa’s off the bench. I am going to have to do some condensing/cleaning/reorganizing over the weekend to figure out how I want to still manage to keep three printers online in there.

I got the A1 set up and let it run through it’s initial configuration and calibration. It has some very cool features out of the box including the ability to be controlled remotely via a computer, phone, or tablet as well having a built in camera to monitor prints. The Bambu filament is actually refillable meaning once you buy a spool you can reuse it and just load new filament onto it. The filament has a RFID tag that allows the printer to automatically know what type and color of filament you have loaded. It’s some very cool tech. I stopped short of doing any test prints. My eyes were burning and I felt very tired so I packed it in for the night with the intent of digging into it more this evening.