Hey, it’s Jon, “The Net Guy,” and I’ve been an avid 3D printer for a while now. I’ve printed on Creality and Prusa clones, but I’ve never really experienced the next generation of 3D printers. Enter the Bambu Lab A1 Mini! Now, people that have had all sorts of 3D printers tell me that this is one of the most enjoyable 3D printing experiences. You don’t even need a computer to be able to start using it. I’m very excited to unbox it today and add it to my lineup of 3D printers. Let’s get started!
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First Impressions
So my first impressions? This thing is incredibly small! Now, the build plate is also relatively small compared to what I’m used to, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t going to be an excellent printing 3D printer. The amount of times that I go over 180 mm in any direction is pretty rare. I’m very excited to see how this thing prints, and I’m kind of looking for a quick start guide or something to tell me how to set this up.
Unboxing and Setup
So here I’m going to start with the quick start guide, assuming I didn’t know anything about 3D printing. Let’s see how far I can get! Super cool stickers are always a plus. Let’s see if I can follow the guide here:
- Spool holder – check
- Accessory box – check
- Purge wiper – check
- PTFE tube – check
- Sample filament – check
- Build plate – check
- This quick guide, unclogging pin tool – check
- Allen one – check
- Allen two – check
- Bamboo scraper blade – check
I’ve heard about this spool holder base, cable organizer, some screws for the spool holder, and some lubricant grease packets along with lubricating oil. Now, I need to remove the four screws to unlock the z-axis limiter. Generally, I’m used to putting 3D printers together when I get them, not taking them apart. But let’s see how this goes!
Installation Steps
Moving the piece as directed, okay now underneath the bed, tighten the four screws to lock the heat bed in. Heat bed locked in, check! Now set the purge wiper unit into the slot at the end of the x-axis. I love the pictures here; I love the instructions so far. Super easy to follow!
I can slide that in, that’s an important piece. Now it wants me to install the spool holder base plate with the two screws from the accessory box. Slide the spool holder, matching the slot orientation. That’s the scraper; this is the spool holder. I’m going to install it in the correct orientation.
Powering Up
I like that all the screws have this blue anti-seize compound already installed on a 3D printer that’s going to get a lot of vibration. That’s a really cool feature! Plug the power cable in the A1 and turn it on. It’s giving me some measurements here of how much spacing I should leave myself. Slide the spool holder on, and calibration’s complete! That was the longest part of the process, about 20-25 minutes.
Getting Ready to Print
So all of that set, I’m excited to start printing something. What should we print first? Well, we’re going to need a spool and we’re going to need some PLA. Fortunately, they include a PTFE tube and some PLA to get us started—probably enough for a Benchy, I hope!
The next component that we’re going to install is the PTFE tube. So the PTFE tube is what the filament slides inside of. In this case, it’s a light gray color. Now, it says if I have an AMS, I would hook the AMS up, and in this case, I’m going to push the PTFE tube in there and push it till it locks in.
Filament Setup
Now I’m going to open up their filament here. This is a sealed packet on purpose because filament, when it’s exposed to air, starts to absorb moisture. So this is also a good way to test out the quality of the Bambu PLA. So far, the installation setup process has been good. I think there are a couple of minor things about just the order that we do operations in that could have been cleaned up a little bit.
Now you’re supposed to guide it upward through the PTFE tube off of this axis rail. We’re going to let this spool loosely here like if it was on an actual spool. I’m going to go ahead and do the standard Benchy. I’m not going to turn on bed leveling because we’ve already got that Dynamic Flow Calibration on, and it says it should take about 20 minutes.
First Print Experience
I like the fact that it’s not superheating the PLA in the extruder while it’s waiting for the bed to come up to temperature. It looked like it actually had some tuning going on here, calibrating extrusion flow. This is a feature of the A1 series that it can calibrate the extruder so you get just the perfect amount of filament. You don’t have to worry about doing all sorts of manual calibration steps with different AMS; this thing is going to figure it out automatically, which is pretty cool!
Now, it was shaking my table like you wouldn’t believe the entire time, and I’m still impressed with the smoothness of all the layers. I’m sure it’ll get even better with a little more effort. So there’s the first Benchy!
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Overall, I’m really impressed with the Bambu Lab A1 Mini. It offers ease of use, automatic features, and solid printing quality for both new and experienced users. If you want to dive into the world of 3D printing, I highly recommend checking it out!
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