Twelve years ago Officeworks started selling a 3D printer, and I thought it was the most advanced possible bit of technology at the time – so I bought one. $1,499 and it worked, but now with the Bambu Lab H2C in the EFTM office I can see how far we’ve come in that time, and how this thing might be the ultimate 3D printer because it’s just so easy to use!
For context, this thing is big. Real big.
If you want some perspective, here’s a coffee mug sitting beside the Bambu Lab H2C
It’s that big because it’s not cheap. $3,699. Now I guess in terms of 12 years on, and scale and capabilities – that’s a bloody good price. But I get it, that’s not entry level 3D printing pricing.
What that is is Adult Money pricing.
If you’re like me, you’ve got adult money and looking for a fun little side hobby – like 3D printing, Honestly, that’s outstanding value.
But – you will need to buy the “ink” – or “filament” – the spools of plastic you can see above sitting next to my printer. I’m several hundred dollars in the can for those, and I just ordered about $400 more by way of like 12 other colours – trust me, it’s addictive.
There’s a USB port on the top, so the first thing we tried to do was download a print file, put it on a stick and plug it in. Nope, Printer wanted to format the drive.
In fact, any time we put a drive in, it wanted to format it, even if we’d just done that. So quite frankly, I haven’t even worked that part of the whole shebang out yet.
Frankly for the month and half we’ve had this Bambu Lab H2C setup, it’s been printing almost non-stop just from the “Bambu Handy” app.
Just search for stuff, someone has made it – almost guaranteed.
From Christmas Decorations to fidget toys, to desk stands and wall hangers it’s been fun. Today we’re printing a magic “wand” with special powers – but we’ll tell you about that in the weeks ahead 🙂
The next step of our journey is for sure to learn how to design and build from scratch, but for now – this is filling all our time!
Our model H2C comes with the AMS unit on the top, which allows five different colours to be in use at one time – four from the auto feeder and one from the side spool.
I was literally blown away watching this work – printing something in multiple colours the machine simply handles it all.
There are multiple sized nozzles stored on the side of the unit which it can robotically switch in and out of as needed within a print.
Critically, there’s no “work” involved to get going. The bed it prints on heats up to allow the plastic to adhere, something 12 years ago that required you to put glue on a glass print plate – we’ve come a long way.
Thanks to a little camera mounted permanently inside the door, you can peek in on print progress too:
And go full screen watching it live:
If you do have a USB drive in and let the machine format it, it will create its own timelapse of the print too – which is epic:
My Frustrations so far have been few and far between, but can be a headache if you let them.
- Slicing Error? Pick a project send it to the printer – slicing error? No idea – but I’ve found checking you’ve got the RIGHT printer setup chosen on the project might be the different
- Feeder error – the side spool feeder would error, and reloading it didn’t always work. I found using a lighter colour here has helped, and not having this doesn’t prevent prints from the AMS feeder, but clearly multi-colour prints will take longer this way.
- USB Format – For the life of me can’t work this out, so that’s a project for the next phase. For now, use a single drive for all Timelapse’s and transfer them to your PC when done, and re-format when you insert the USB again.
Overall thought, I’ve been utterly impressed with this unit. I’m intrigued as to what the LASER COMBO does, allowing us to laser etch things? Sign me up.
Grab yourself a plastic bucket for the plastic poop from this thing, and the print towers from multi coloured prints.
But for now I’ve got more learning to do, and some designing to do. Perhaps our next EFTM Best Trophies will all be 3D Printed!
Web: Bambu Lab
Trev is a Technology Commentator, Dad, Speaker and Rev Head.
He produces and hosts several popular podcasts, EFTM, Two Blokes Talking Tech, Two Blokes Talking Electric Cars, The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, and the Private Feed. He is the resident tech expert for Triple M on radio across Australia, and is the resident Tech Expert on Channel 9’s Today Show and appears regularly on 9 News, A Current Affair and Sky News Early Edition.
Father of three, he is often found in his Man Cave.
