We’ve been having a good old time with this over on the Pocket Knife community, but I figure there’s probably a lot of crossover with this crowd as well.
I’m sure you’ve seen various clever little one piece utility knife blade holders on Thingiverse and so forth, and while they’re quite functional I don’t think they’re nearly as overwrought or silly enough, nor require quite enough components.
Rather than repeat my entire post from there over here, I’ll leave you with these:
Link to .STL Files And Assembly Instructions
I am given to understand that the Bambu is a significantly more capable printer, but for what I paid for the Qidi a couple of years ago I have been very pleased with it just far. If the spectrum goes from 0 to 10, where 0 is receiving an unsorted box of exploded parts and wires, and 10 is a sealed black box built by magic pixies from space, the X-Plus is a solid 7. I didn’t really have to do anything to it to get it working well or keep it going, although I did make some minor quality of life mods and I shoved a Raspberry Pi and one of its little camera modules into it so I can remote view what’s going on in there and hit the kill switch over the wire if necessary.
If you’re into the Bambu’s main party trick, Qidi actually do make a model or two with dual extruders so you can do multi-color or multi-material prints. But mine isn’t one of those. The Bambu machines (except maybe their little A1 Mini) are probably all noticeably faster than the Qidi as well. But the Qidi costs, like, a quarter as much as an X1 carbon, and half as much as a P1P.
Interesting. I saw the Qidi X-Plus 3 advertises 600mm/s vs Bambu P1S 500mm/s. And the P1S doesn’t offer a heated chamber. Have you noticed a difference in quality from the heated chamber?
I haven’t yet been convinced of the bambu cool-aid mainly because of closed software. Klipper support is a big value prop. Who knows how long bambu will support OS versions and what happens if they start charging for cloud. It’s a young company, so not a lot of confidence yet.
The chamber is not heated per se, but if you cap it off with the included lid the bed heater can raise the internal temperature quite a bit. There is no PID for the chamber temp, though. It just winds up being whatever it is due to the waste heat feom the bed and extruder. You can’t actually control it.
That said, I have printed ABS with it no problem. I have a roll of PA-CF, but haven’t unwrapped it yet because I’m still chicken.