Y Splitter for the Bambu Lab AMS and Spool Holder

hey everyone in this video I want to show you how to assemble and install the Y splitter that I designed for the bamboo X1 Carbon AMS system hope you enjoy so the first thing we're going to do is cut our PTFE tube and you want to make sure you use the extra tube that came with your printer because these are four millimeter outside diameter and two and a half millimeter inside most tubes that you get these days the common ones are only a two millimeter inside diameter and they're really not recommended and may not work very well for this project and if you don't have any it can be ordered on bamboo Labs website you want to cut a short one to approximately 45 to 50 millimeters and I think mine is at about 48 right now and then you want to cut a second one a little bit longer somewhere between 70 and 100 is fine you don't have to be as fussy here I think mine's about 70 and it works great these two pieces are going to attach to the splitter and the short one is going to go into the single bottom of the Y and the longer one is going to go into the as it's facing you is going to going to go into the bottom section of the tube here and I designed this so that they use standard pc4 by M10 PTFE connectors and the reason I like these is because they grip the PTFE tool and hold it into place you can only push it in One Direction and then it grips it and then in order to release it the little black cap here is spring loaded so you have to push that in while you pull it out I modeled this because I wanted one where the tube would seat a little bit deeper and it's a good snug fit and it bottoms out like 17 millimeters down somewhere in that range I think it's I think it's modeled at 17. so these push in nice and snug they bottom out and honestly you might you might be able to use them without these connectors but I'm going to plan on using this for a long time so that's the way I did it so after you cut these I'm not going to do it because mine are already cut but you want to use either a good PTFE cutter that you want to make sure they're nice and square on the cut if you don't have one of these make sure you use a really sharp blade in your utility knife and get it you know get it on some kind of surface where you can give it a nice square cut straight down and because the dimensions aren't super critical you know we've got a range of 45 to 50 and 70 to really as long as you care to go I think 70 is a good length you can probably easily go up to 100 without any problem and then the other thing you can do just after you make the cuts is if you have a little chamfering bit this is a little small size I have from a set a cheap set that I got at Harbor Freight and just just I don't do it by hand I wouldn't put it in the drill but just give it a few spins to kind of just take the Inside Edge down and make sure it's nice and smooth on both ends if you don't have one of these bits you can do that with a utility knife and again be careful and go slow if you kind of hold it and just spin it with your fingers here like so and you can kind of put just put a little chamfer or clean up the edge any rough edges that may have resulted from your cut once that is done the next step is to ins screw in our um our fittings here our pc4 by M10 fittings so there's three versions of this in the model I put in printables and they printed right on the part the only difference between the three is the the clearance on the threaded portion here so I did one with zero clearance one with zero point or .05 and a third one that's 0.1 um the 0.05 I printed on my bamboo with this is with pet G from new makers um it's actually a slightly loose fit but they I can snug them down without them stripping so this works well I probably could have got away with the zero clearance but I didn't feel the need to reprint this because it works so well it's it's a little snug which is what I want and I can get them pretty hand tight and almost the bottom out but go ahead and insert these and just go slow and make sure they go in and don't cross thread and then take either your an M10 wrench or an adjustable wrench and just tighten them up until they snug up and kind of Hit the bottom out in the uh in the hole here you don't want to over crank it because you don't want to strip it but just yeah just crank them down until they're nice and snug and then this is ready to go so we the way this is going to install is we're going to put this on the back of the printer and we've got an M3 by 6 second head screw that's going to go through this slot into a screw or screw hole we're going to remove the screw and from the back panel of the printer to mount this and then this just fits right in it just snaps in with a nice positive click so that whole thing is going to be screwed in and held in place with the clip so the way this is going to work is we're going to insert the short piece of PTFE tube into the single side of the bottom side of the Y and just push it in and make sure the whole thing bottoms out in there I'm going to take my clip off here so that's all the way down and that's good to go and then the logger piece when this is mounted we're gonna we're gonna feed from the spool holder into the bottom side here so that's where you want this piece to go and again push it in make sure Bottom's all the way out in there and I forgot to grab a piece of filament let me get my visual aid for that so I'll just grab a short piece of filament like this and we're going to use this just to test and make sure everything is moving cleanly so with everything bottomed out in here put your filament in and uh before you do that make sure these are also cut Square because the AMS when it um it does the cut in the film and it cuts it Square so all those years of cutting at an angle we don't want to do that when we're dealing with the x1c or the p1p for this device here so just slide it in and you may feel just a little bit of a catch wait where the PTFE tube ends right in here and and then it's just all plastic until it hits this PTFE tube the important one on this one is just it's barely grabbing but it's fine but you can see it moves through and it moves really freely in here so when you're doing when you're feeding filament from the AMS manually you're going to push it in manually here and it's yeah this is really good I've been using this for a couple of months and it works great you can test the top piece now this is going to be the longer PTFE tube coming from the AMS loops around goes in here and then this this tube feeds the hot end the extruder so a filament comes from the AMS loops around comes into this the tube is hooked up here and it comes in and if you slide that in and test it there's so you can see there's no resistance this is the one that's probably more important not to have any any catching or you want a super smooth motion because this is the one that's all automated so when the AMS retracts it pulls it all the way out of here and then when it pushes in the new color it pushes it in got to hit the hole in there and that moves really smooth so this is the action you want you want this to be able to move really freely through here and again if it's not pull your PTFE out try a little champ for a little bit more so the other thing I did on one of these is I just took a I have this two and a half millimeter handheld drill with two and a handheld drill the two and a half millimeter bit and I just put it in there and just gave it a couple of light turns and pulled it out and it just gets that little bit of plastic that might be on the edge of the two millimeter hole that's inside here if you don't have one of these another one of these I have some of these little Diamond coated diamond dust scraping sanding tools this works pretty well as well you can just get in there and just twist it around on the edge knock out any loose filament and then put it all back together honestly this the way this is modeled and the way it prints on the bamboo I really didn't have any any real issues here so again the short one goes in here just make sure it's bottomed out because that will also minimize the chance of it catching then you're good to go so now we're ready to go to the back of the printer and install this thing so let's go to the back of the printer we're going to install the assembled y splitter and the clip are going to be mounted here on this court we're going to take the screw out which I've already removed on this corner of the side panel uh it is the equivalent to the one you see over here and that's where you're going to need your two millimeter hex wrench to remove that one tip I will give you make sure you use the short side of the L on this when you remove it because these are in really tight and I've had plenty of hex heads strip out on me when I've haven't got it seated in tight or I used the long arm when it's super tight to try to loosen it it tends to strip for some reason more than when I use the short side so I seem to get better leverage when I get it locked in there nice and then you can turn it and just be careful you're not stripping it as you go step one is to remove this screw and then before we Mount anything we need to remove the PTFE tube from this side of the coupler and the way these work like I demonstrated earlier they're spring loaded when this little black side here so you need to push that black piece in and I'll try to do it so you can see what I'm doing just so I'm just using my thumbnail to hold it in and then just pull that out and you can see it wasn't inserted very far that's a very short travel on this particular connection here and so with this disconnected I would just make sure that it's routed above the uh The Hub connection where it plugs in and under the spool holder and then we're ready to insert the um the connector with our PTFE tubes inserted and again we're going to push it in the short side the bottom of the Y goes in here and I just made sure it's bottomed out and then I'm going to snap on my clip like so and then I made this slot adjustable so depending on the variable length of your tube here you've got you can maybe go another five millimeters this direction [Music] out you know outward before you're gonna you know you'd have to cut the tube shorter uh it's much the slots much longer than it needs to be but this tube here doesn't have much Flex it can't really push into the printer so um but it's easier to get this all snapped and inserted before you put the screw in so that you've got a nice tight fit and you're not you don't have this tightened down and then you're fighting to get that in there so with that done we take our our two and a half millimeter hex key and insert our carefully hold our little three by eight three millimeter I'm sorry not by eight by six and just hold it in there and then just give it a couple of turns get it in there and give it a couple of turns to get it started and again this there's not a lot of room behind this to hold it so when you crank this in it's only going to take a couple of turns to get tight and I did try using an eight millimeter long screw in here and it doesn't work it's too loose and it bottoms out and frankly this thing will actually work probably work fine without even being held within the clip if you kind of let it flop around I just prefer to have it snapped in because it it seems to hold it and keep it in in good shape so now the last piece to do it is to take our PTFE tube from the AMS a little junction box thingy here and slide it in down here and again push it in all the way hold it firmly and make sure that this thing goes all 17 millimeters in and bottoms out in there you may find it easier to pop it off the clip give it a good push and now then we can take our piece of test filament and just test the operation again just to make sure and I'm going to push that in and yeah that slides no problem so the way this will work is you take whatever spool you wanna load from the um spool holder and you want to make sure let me pull this out and straighten that out so this is a roll of new makers pet G which I just love I discovered their filament and it works so well for the bamboo it just prints great very little stringing end of the ad but basically what you're going to do is just take this push it in and you just keep pushing one caveat here before you start feeding this in make sure all of your AMS filaments are are unloaded oh and then the other thing to note is you want to feed the filament from the bottom of the Roll if you're coming off the top it's going to be really hard to make like impossible to make that turn so so yeah so you just take it and keep feeding it take the filament coming from the bottom feed it in here and keep pushing till it hits the extruder and you'll feel it stop when it gets there yep I just hit it so now if you have the latest firmware where they support the on the filament tab it now lists the spool holder as a separate item you can test it and make sure everything works so I'm going to move the camera around okay I want to take a shot at filming my touch screen here and see how well it works so to test this basically what we're going to do is wake up our screen we're going to go to the settings in the filament Tab and you can see the new firmware now has the the new spool holder section that it didn't have before with the four AMS units or 8 or 12 or 16 depending how many you have so quick way to test this is we're going to take I'm just going to select slot one the pet G here and I'm going to tell it to go ahead and load this and so it's going to heat up the hot end and again I don't know how well if you can read that but it's prompting us what it's going to do here so it's heating up the nozzle to 250 degrees and that happens pretty quickly it's going to cut the filament when it's done with that okay we're almost there we're at 240 degrees and it's performing the cut [Applause] and now it's pulling gonna pull back the current filament well there's nothing to pull back as nothing's loaded so what this is telling us is that it's a good thing it reminded me so I did remember I did push this in it actually meant to test this first and not the AMS but so pull this back out we don't want this in while we're loading and don't ask me how I know but it's very important to make sure you remember to do that the new firmware really helps because it's a little more uh dummy proof for me guys like me who forget to do that stuff so I've removed that filament and now I just tell it to retry so it detected that I pushed the filament up to the uh up to the extruder so now it's loading the you can hear it I'll see if I can dial back if you can see that spinning it just loaded the filament and if we go over here and take a look you can see the green filament is in my PTFE tube and it pushed it through and [Music] the the next step is that it's actually purging old filament right now so if I open the door yeah we're not gonna it's too dark in there to see but basically what it did is it Purge the old filament down the poop chute out the back now it's ready to go so we can we can start printing with the green PLA and the print job or we can do an unload test which is what I'm going to do so I'm going to select it make sure it's selected and then hit unload and it's going to heat the nozzle up again cut the filament and then it's going to back it out and this just ensures that our splitter is handling pushing the filament through it and pulling it back out with nothing getting screwed up or jammed and that's exactly what happened really it can't be really hard for it to fail pulling it back out where the biggest potential for failure is going to be when it's inserting it and you can see that it just backed out that filament and if we want to test it again let me get over here again um I'm going to send the I think the orange will probably show up the best so I'm going to select my orange and I'm going to select load and we're pretty warmed up already so it should happen pretty quickly and if you watch the tube here as it's loading um it'll be it'll be pushing the filament coming up from the bottom through here feeding it to the extruder so here it comes if you watch we should see it come up here there it goes and yeah it it works perfect there's no resistance going through It's not catching on anything it's going right to the extruder and now it's purging the old filament so I can see the green being purged and when it's done uh I should get a prompt on the screen here if I remember right [Music] nope it's just done yeah so I think where the there's a purge option when you use the other one so let's go ahead and test the spool holder side now so I'm going to unload this [Music] and wait for that to back out and what's nice when you have the AMS unit is this is all automated there's no manual intervention and you can see the the oranges the orange pet G is being backed out and unloaded and now I want to go ahead and I'm going to load the from the spool holder I should mention I put white pet G on there so I should probably change that if I'm actually going to print something the last thing I printed was black pla from back there so you can hit the little edit icon and I can tell that now that I've got pet G and my color is white and confirm and so now with that selected I'm going to say load it's going to heat the nozzle up and I'm going to intentionally not feed it in there yet I'm going to wait till it tells me which if you can read that it's going to be step two here so once the nozzle is up to temp there we go and we should get a dialog box now telling us to feed this um the filament from the spool holder until the tool head sensor is triggered so we're gonna grab that filament and just like I showed earlier I'm not going to move the camera this time I'm going to manually feed this in until I can feel it hit the hot end extruder down there and I guess I haven't watched there so it it triggered on its own I didn't have to like acknowledge anything on my dialog box as soon as I felt it hit it was ready to go so now it's telling me to observe the nozzle if the filament has been extruded click done if it's not push it again and hit retry but I can see that the filament is extruding and it's pushing the orange filament out of there and so I'm now I'm going to hit uh done not close and then I'm gonna move my camera down let's see if I can do this uh yeah that's way too dark so what it's doing right now is is it's extruding more much like it would do on a filament change um and purging all the orange so that it flowed long enough that I got nothing but white out there so now I've got the white filament loaded and I'm ready to go so when I jump into my slicer and send a job to the printer the only thing I have to be careful of is let me go to the homes actually go to the file menu just to show you I'm going to pick a I'm going to pick an Easter Bunny to print here um and I can change this to pet G if I tell it not to use oh I think because I sliced it for pla it won't take that let me find a different model um let's see internal yeah I just here's my uh my y Splitters I just printed in pet G so if I tell it not to use the AMS and this was pretty well I could have it use the ABS AMS because I have my colors loaded here so I can switch to any pet G that's on here but I can't pick the spool holder even though I have a pet G loaded in it and I've told the filament tab that I do have pet G in that it doesn't show up as an option here so in order to get that option what I have to do is deselect use eams and then it it went right and it's gonna it tells me I need pet G loaded and it really um I think if I had purely in there it may not work I haven't I haven't had this new firmware long enough to know for sure but now at this point I can choose whether I want to lead the level of bed do flow calibration and or time lapse and print it and it'll go off and print it since I don't need to print these again I'm going to go back so and you can do all of this from the slicer as well before you send the job to a printer so that's really it I hope the splitter if you choose to print it works great for you I just wanted something that used those pc4 by M10 connectors and had a little little deeper path for the PTFE tube to be seated in there just it just seems to work really well for me and it was a fun little project to design so thanks for watching and I hope come back for the next one take care bye

Channel: Making With An EdJ

Views: 14,962

Keywords: Bambu Lab x1C, Bambu Lab X1C AMS, X1Carbon, Fusion 360, Y-Splitter

Id: _O-eqUQ1SiI

Length: 22min 55sec (1375 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023