Printer Set Up: First Changes Since 2025

 

We've been detailing how we have our hardware set up for our 3D Printing at our school - and it also formed part of our '3D Printing Lore' series of posts where we were looking at a single printer for the entire school, for the calendar year, our H2D Bambu.

That has changed recently at Auroa Primary School.

We have started the process of upgrading our secondary printers, still using the large Bambu H2D for the larger projects but we have have added to our printing resources two secondary printers a Bambu P1P and a Bambu P1S.   We have started the process of replacing the Snapmaker machines that we have on site and will soon be producing prints on Bambu.

The thinking behind this is based around the reliability of the machines and what meets our needs as a school.  We want to be able to produce material (prints) as seamlessly as possible and while we have been pleased in the past with our group of four to five machines of Ultimakers (and then the various upgrades and reconditioning that we completed to various 'plus' models) of Snapmakers and now Bambu,

We switched because we want to minimise the time spent on engineering the machines, which is essentially been unblocking them when a print has failed due to some technical issue.   

The amount of 'rafting' has also decreased significantly overtime if you consider ten years ago some of the prints that were being produced were encased in support plastic to ensure it was stable.   Recently the newer print process has significantly reduced this although we also do need to note we have been stockpiling all of our PLA and intend to recycle it using Kiwifil,  a New Zealand company we discovered earlier in the year.

The photographs with this print also show another aspect to the printers - the connectivity between them.  In this instance with the P1S the yellow casing that you can see visible is the 'Mario Themed' casing which is available by the Bambu Labs online portal.  

We have used the resource to produce material like the 'waste shoots' for the printers which can then be clipped onto the machines.

These are not items or resources that we are needing to create ourselves but freely available files and resources that come in with the online portal supporting the machines.

Moving forward we will be identifying with future prints which of our machines that we will be using to produce them, noting the difference in time being the most obvious point of difference.