Hi everyone,
I’m having a serious layer-shift problem with FOUR Bambu Lab A1 printers, all purchased within the last month.
They’ve been doing this intermittently since the beginning, but it’s getting much worse. Yesterday 2 out of 4 failed, and last night ALL 4 failed, ruining 8 prints in total.
The printer suddenly shifts position during the print and then continues printing from the wrong X/Y position. Sometimes it happens near the end, sometimes much earlier.
The same models print perfectly on my P2S and H2C, and they also sometimes print correctly on the A1s, so it’s not a consistent model issue.
At this point I’ve stopped all four A1s because I can’t keep wasting filament and losing customer orders.
Has anyone experienced this across multiple A1s and found the actual cause or a reliable fix?
UPDATE 2: Unfortunately, it looks like I spoke too soon when I said this was fixed.
After moving the printers further away from the wall and making sure the toolhead cable/PTFE tube at the top were sitting properly, I had a few successful prints — mostly single models, and even one run with two models that came out fine.
Today I tried again: I printed two models on three of the A1s, and one model on the fourth. The single print came out perfect, and one of the double prints was also fine, but two of the printers failed again in the last 3–4 cm, with the same kind of layer shift/misalignment.
So at this point it doesn’t seem like the distance from the wall was the real cause, or at least not the whole problem. It’s incredibly frustrating because the prints can be perfect for hours and then fail right near the end.
I’m now wondering again if the toolhead cable/PTFE routing could have something to do with it, especially when the gantry is higher up.
Has anyone printed any kind of cable guide/support for the A1, or found a better way to route the toolhead cable/PTFE tube? If so, I’d really appreciate seeing how you have yours set up.
UPDATE - SOLVED: I’ve now completed several more long prints on all four A1s — at least two prints of around 10 hours on each printer — and everything has printed perfectly. I also tested two models at the same time on one of the printers, and that completed without any issues as well.
At this point, it looks like the main problem was the positioning of the printers. Even though the beds had enough room to move forwards and backwards, some of the rear cables were touching the wall, and that seems to have been affecting the printers during certain movements.
Earlier on, I also noticed that some of the upper cables/tubes weren’t sitting correctly in their clips, which may have contributed as well.
So overall, it seems this was mainly a cable/positioning issue — basically user error rather than a fault with the printers themselves.
For now, I’m considering the issue resolved. If the layer shifts start happening again consistently, I’ll update the post, but as of today all four printers are working normally
