I’m planning on rebuilding my 525/Burly MPCNC and wondering if anyone has recent experience printing MPCNC parts with a 0.6mm or 0.8mm nozzle, especially with a Bambu printer? Last time I used an original Ender 3 and this time I have access to a Bambu X-1 Carbon.
I’m mainly wondering if people who tried the larger nozzles actually ran into any issues with parts not fitting or working for some reason and if so, which ones?
I’ve read a lot of old posts, but the discussions I could find were mainly speculating how well it would work, or discussing the Bambu printer, or about messing with settings to try to get those nozzles to work at all. My experience with the Bambu is that it just works well with the default presets, so looking for people who either have a Bambu printer and have tried one of those nozzle sizes or has tuned another printer to do it.
My rough understanding is that the larger the nozzle, the faster and stronger the prints are, but with some loss of detail. I have used a 0.6mm nozzle a bit, but not on anything where detail was important. The Bambu is already crazy fast compared to the Ender 3 and the 0.6mm made it even faster. If the 0.8mm makes it even faster and is also stronger that would be amazing.
I used a 0.8mm for most of my early prints with my A1. I didn’t really have any issues related to detail. Everything seemed to go together just fine . I did have one warped plate that I’m unclear as to why but I’m pretty new to this 3d printing thing.
Here’s my build thread
Happy with my 0.6mm nozzle printed LR3 and MP3DP v4 parts. That said, just ordered a REVO 0.8mm high flow nozzle for non V1E projects where dimensional quality isn’t as critical.
I used a 0.8mm nozzle for all my prints. I had issues with prints from one of my spools but the other spool worked well so I had to reprint a few parts.
Thanks everyone for sharing your experience. I realized I can get estimates for how much time I would save with the slicer, which is pretty good at time estimates compared to Cura. For the core at the default settings, it’s ~8hrs with 0.4mm, 6hrs with 0.6mm, and 5hrs with 0.8mm. You don’t get as much of a decrease in printing time going from 0.6mm to 0.8mm as you do from 0.4mm to 0.6mm. It seems like it might be hitting the limit of how fast the nozzle can melt the plastic.
For a very rough comparison I sliced the core in Cura for my Ender 3 and got a print time of 34hrs. I don’t know how accurate that is, but my memory is that Cura is actually optimistic.
So the biggest decrease in printing time is just going from the old ender 3 to the bambu. All the decreases are significant over such a huge print job, but since most people print with 0.4mm and the parts are strong enough I think I will just use the 0.6mm and hopefully get a little increase in strength.
Oh, as a side note, you can actually go faster than those speeds. I haven’t actually tried changing the speeds in the slicing profile, but there a couple of presets you can change while printing to increase the speed, “sport mode” which is 124% and “ludicrous mode” which is 166%. I’m usually printing functional parts and don’t notice a huge difference in sport mode, but there is often a noticeable difference in quality with ludicrous mode and only use it when I’m in a hurry, often to get one more iteration of a prototype before then end of the day.
In case people are curious, with a 0.6mm nozzle, 3 perimeters, 50% infill (except 70% core), I finished printing all the parts on the Bambu in about 2.5 days with around 45hrs of printing time and the parts all look great. [and it could have been faster if I used sport and mode loaded up the plates. I usually only printed one type of part at a time, eg 4 corner tops ]
