H2C4TW

About 10 months ago I splurged and ordered the Bambulab H2C 3D printer, and for 9 months it's steadily chugging along here. It's not printing non-stop, but it feels pretty close to that sometimes.

I've printed mostly PLA, but also TPU, ASA, PETG, PVA and Bambu's "Support for PLA/PETG"

And apart from one issue where a sensor was misbehaving and needed replacement, the machine is just ..

.. working. It is not foolproof, nor has every print been a success, but the vast majority of them. The machine spat out miniatures, terrain pieces, cosplay stuff, plastic toys for my nieces and nephews, functional and decorative prints for the household, cat toys, foam dart blasters, props for games, and so on.

But why did I upgrade from the X1C that I had until then?

1. FOMO. yeah, sometimes that gets me too.
2. The tool change functionality. Since I have that, I actually do multicolour prints, because they are a lot faster this way, but mostly because there is so much less plastic waste this way.
3. The bigger build plate. It's "just" about 8cm more for each side, but those do make a notable difference in what I can print, or how many parts I can put into one print job.

I do acknowledge that Bambu is not a particularly FLOSS-friendly company, and that its products are decidedly less open than a home-built Voron printer. But...

...they do simply work. Again, they are not foolproof, this is after all a machine with high-speed moving parts that heat up to 300° and move molten plastic around based on user-generated software instructions. Of course something is bound to go wrong occasionally.

And despite all of this, most of the time whenever something goes wrong, the machine fails gracefully. It stops before things get worse, it asks the operator to check, it spits out messages that include a link to a friendly wiki with further information.

This has gotten to the point where the machine is extra busy now, because the girlfriend has spent one afternoon learning the basics from me and is now competing with me for machine time.

So, I am not saying that this is the perfect 3D printer. But it is gosh darn good and near perfect for how I use this. I can see the upside of a toolchanger that doesn't need to retract and reinsert filament all the time. But I do think that the advantage of being able to ad hoc combine different nozzle sizes with different filaments just in software outweighs that completely.