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Comment by alnwlsn | Hacker News Reader

If you decide to get a Bambu anyway, let me heartily recommend against an H2D.

It did "just work" for a while, but then the print cooling fan went bad. On my home Voron, this would be a 5 minute fix. On the H2D, it is this [0]. You basically have to take the entire toolhead apart, removing the mainboard inside it with no less than 11 very tiny and fragile custom ribbon cables that connect to it, plus 5 more connections on a second board that goes on top of it. Most minor fixes are like this. Another time, I had to remove a stuck piece of filament, which involved taking apart the whole front of the toolhead and dealing with even smaller and more fragile flex PCBs.

[0] https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/h2/maintenance/replace-cooling-...

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> On my home Voron,

You're not the target market for Bambu customers.

This is like complaining that on your dirt track racer it's a trivial process to swap the rear end spur and change final drive ratios. Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.

Maybe they should care a little, because the long-term repairability of their BMW or Bambu is going to put a real dent in their resale value. But they're not the ones dealing with tweezers and ZIF connectors and flex PCBs, so it's mostly just not their problem.

3D printers used to be exclusively the domain of people who enjoyed doing all this work themselves, who loved a well-designed machine that was a joy to work with like a Voron. That's no longer the case, Bambu is offering unrepairable black boxes that "just work" for enough time that some people can afford not to think care how it's made.

>Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.

We wouldn't really care either, but alas, there is no 3D printer dealership service center (unless you count 1 month round trip to ship it back).

I'd argue that my workplace who bought the H2D is exactly Bambu's target market. Most of us have personal printers we tinker with, but for work projects we need something that is mostly hit print and wait. We aren't really running a print farm, but we do a lot of iterations and make prototypes constantly. This is what the H2D was purchased for (specifically, the heated enclosure to better print ASA parts). Being hard to repair isn't really a problem, it's that it broke at all. And after it does break, changing a fan or clearing a jam should not be overhaul grade maintenance.

We also have a couple of P1Ss that are very solid, the one H2D has all the problems.

who actually is the target market though?

im not using a melted bead printer if care in any way about the quality of the result. resin printers are readily availble

the bmw owner is buying a better machine, or just paying somebody to do the printing for them

Sounds like RC quadcopters society -- everyone knows DJI, but they make fan guards a part of the frame. Guards and props are the most fragile parts, a consumable really. Something an enthusiast often carry spares for, to quickly swap on the field for any other RC quad, but with DJI you need what, send the whole frame to factory?

I have DJI drone, broke prop maybe once, replaced in few minutes. Prop guards work as intended.

I did once got it into iron sand which seized the motors. Luckily their insurance covered full replacement.

There are much worse things about them like subpar performance or shitty way to access the card slot in Avata, but otherwise they solid.

I mean prop guards -- what do you do when a prop guard breaks?

IDK what sort of guards you speak off but I don’t think it’s possible to do so on my avata. I did smash it pretty hard few times.

I like my H2D, but it definitely hit a brick wall. I replaced it, and had the same issue with one of the nozzles not printing consistently.

This was after around 700 hours, which isn’t terrible, but working with their support is exhausting. I don’t think I’m going to touch it again until winter, unfortunately.

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