3D printing company Bambu Lab has ordered a recall on its latest product, the A1. The company released a blog post stating that some of its A1 machines could have damaged cables that connect the heat bed to the main body of the printer. This damage could be enough to cause a fire, and in one case discussed on the Bambu Forum, it caused burns to the machine as well as causing a power cut in a user’s home.
On the blog post, Bambu Lab identified several ways this issue could occur:
We should have designed the strain relief (SR) better to protect the cable from any damage. Our investigation has identified several factors that may cause this damage:
- Rough handling during transportation, like dropping the package in certain directions so that the root of the cable is impacted.
- During installation, if the base is vertically placed on the table with the cable side at the bottom, all the weight of the printer will be concentrated on the root of the cables and cause damage.
- After the installation, the cable’s root on the printer base is impacted by external force by accident.
Bambu Lab has offered two distinct resolutions to this issue. If your cable is damaged — you can tell by the squeezed-in shape of the cable near the printer base — then you can fill in this form to have the damaged machine shipped back and a new one sent out. If you find damage on your A1 cable you should stop using it immediately and fill in the form as soon as possible. No one wants your printer to catch on fire.
If your printer doesn’t have any signs of damage but you are still worried about it, you can 3D print a cable guard that can attach to your A1 to help protect your cable from the kink. Bambu hasn’t said if it will start to include the cable guard with new shipments of the A1, but the company did say it would be repackaging the ones it currently has to make sure the cable isn’t damaged in transit.
The review unit that CNET received shows some early signs of that damage, and I don’t remember it being there when I first started using it. The A1 review unit has been through 240 hours of use at this point in a somewhat confined space, so I will be reaching out to Bamabu through the form to see what the next steps are and printing the cable protector to see how that works.
