Reducing Bambu Lab waste filament

As the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon printers are single extruder with four filament feeds, every time the colour is changed, the nozzle must be purged. This creates a lot of waste filament, unlike some other printers which have multiple nozzles. 

It is important to reduce this wastage as much as possible to both look after our environment and help uCreate remain stocked with material. 

Below are some ideas of how to reduce your filament wastage, we strongly encourage users to use them when ever they can. 

Any filament waste that is produced should be disposed of in the filament recycling boxes provided by uCreate. The filament in these boxes is sent off and recycled into more usable filament. 

When setting up your print, you can choose how much filament is flushed through the nozzle during a filament change. This is automatically set to 1. However, the volume of flushing required is dependant on the different filament colours you are using. For example. less volume is needed to flush between similar colour (e.g. yellow to orange), than between very different colours (e.g. black to white).

This means that you will likely be able to reduce the flushing volumes from the default setting. 

To reduce your flushing volumes in Bambu Studio:

1. Open up your project and ensure all of your filament colours are set correctly. 
2. Click on 'Flushing volumes'.
3. Change your multiplier to a number between 0.00 and 3.00. As you change the multiplier, the numbers in the table will change. As long as no numbers are in the red, the quality of your print should not be effected.

We produced a print with dark blue and white filament with the flushing values in the red and experienced no colour print quality reduction.

When setting up your print, you can hide filament which would normally be wasted, as infill to strengthen your model or for your supports. The colour of infill and supports does not matter.

You can also add an extra object to your build plate to be printed out of otherwise wasted filament. Adding an extra object to print from flushed filament, does not add significant time to your 3D print. 

To flush filament into supports and infill of all objects in Bambu Studio:

1. Open up your project and ensure all of your filament colours are set correctly. 
2. Under 'Process' click on 'Global'. 
3. Select 'Others'.
4. Scroll down to 'Flush options'.
5. Tick 'Flush into objects' infill' and 'Flush into objects' support'. 
6. Slice your model to see where different colours will be used. 

To flush filament into a separate object in Bambu Studio:

1. Open up your project and ensure all of your filament colours are set correctly. 
2. Under 'Process' click on 'Objects'. 
3. Select the object (either from the object list or the build plate) that you want to flush into.
4. Select 'Others'.
5. Tick 'Flush into this object'.
6. Slice your model to see where different colours will be used. 

While one of the main perks of the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon printers is their multi-colour printing but not all models are best printed in one piece. Multi-colour printing should also only be used when one part has multiple colours within it, if you want to print four objects, all in a solid different colour, these should be printed separately. 

In the example below, you have two models, one of which is green and white and the other is blue and red, even though these could all be printed at once with the four slots in the AMS (Automatic Material System), these should be printed separately. Printing these separately will save roughly 8 hours of print time and 30m of filament. 

Switching colours less often not only makes your prints faster but also reduces waste.