Reducing waste from Bambu Lab AMS (lite) prints

Theres a model on printables called "Bambulab Profile for up to 60% purge reduction" and it does exactly that. Pretty much it moves the filament up close to the cold end before cutting it. This reduces the physical amount the needs to be extruded.

Layer height also makes a big difference. Fewer layers means fewer filament changes.

You can also purge into an object. So if you have a tool or something where you don’t care about color banding, that can be an option instead of duplicate models

I like the way you visually showed the results in the bins. I like the AMS, but I try to print with less than 20 color changes and fill the build plate with as many copies as possible. I think your results could be even better if you ran some tests to get the color swap amounts down to the bare minimum.

Excellent analysis. Glad to see if you print multiple models, the waste doesn't increase and the time increased slightly. Great info to know!

I don’t have a bamboo labs yet but if I did; this would be one of the most useful videos I’d ever seen. Great video, great process, and really well presented. Thank you for sharing. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

I have a p1s+ams on order that should be here next week and this experiment will be EXTREMELY helpful to guide my workflows for multicolor printing. thank you!

Your channel and CNC Kitchen are probably the best resources for 3D printing.

YouTube videos that save me money are my favorite YouTube videos. Very well earned "Like".

Fantastic treatment of this experiment. It was very well organized and easy to duplicate. Well done!

Orientation can also massively affect tool changes

Just one thing… If you use flushing volumes / autocalc, IMHO that works well, also with at factor as low as 0,3, but I guess that depends on the model. But, if you later change filaments, which you generally do a lot with a 3d printer and forget to go by flushing volumes to update the calculation, note that that will not update automatically and you'll end up with a flushing table written for a completely other world than the one you're in and if you, perchance, start a print at night and go to bed and wake up the next morning to find your flashy new print, it'll look like rubbish. Beleive me on this ;)

This is great info. I am thinking about getting the P1S and would prefer to not waste so much filament. You gave some great solutions to this problem, but it was also helpful to read through the comments and see suggestion such as having that waste actually going towards making another object… Thanks again

Filament could be saved if they had a slicer feature that could do variable infill or use the waste material on a second model where colors don't matter. But a model with 10% infill has plenty of room to use up some of that otherwise wasted filament.

Imagine if the slicer had a "low priority print" that only prints with the flushes? It would print the main object with the correct filament, but when it is transition, instead of throwing away the filament it prints another object, something that you defined as low priority in terms of color. That second object will have an arbitrary color, but at least you wouldn't waste material.

For that particular model, I'd be curious to see you shift it to a vertical orientation with supports and see how that impacts the volumes. By having the color changes oriented to the direction the model is sliced, I'd imagine significantly fewer material changes and purges. Obviously, you would now have material in supports, but it would still be interesting to see the impact.

I think one of the most important tuning areas for multi material solutions like the AMS is print orientation. Instead of requiring material changes for every single layer, orienting the model vertically would reduce them significantly. Of course this is not a viable solution for every application, but nevertheless very important to keep in mind while doing multi material prints.

This is amazing content! Super helpful. I will absolutely be printing as many duplicates as I can on each sheet for this reason. So much less waste overall. I also intend on keeping every bit of waste over time until I can set up a functional recycling system at home, or when the day comes that filament recycling is a normal thing. Thanks!

Excellent video thank you very much! Just one thing to keep in mind: when switching to a single color print after using multiple colors, there might be some color bleeding due to the absence of a purge block. So, a bit of extra attention is needed to ensure a clean color transition. However, for multicolor prints, this method works wonderfully.

Brand new to quality machines. Went from a Monoprice Delta 2 POS to a Bambu X1C. I have been watching and such about the X1* but because I never had one, I couldn't gain muscle memory on this stuff. This video got you a subscribe. Now, DO MORE!!! lol