Bambu Lab A1

Is a 0.2mm nozzle worth it for small prints?

A 0.2mm nozzle costs very little and everyone says it is better for miniatures. This is five prints of the same 40mm crusader trying to find out how much better, and where it stops mattering. The short version: layer lines disappear almost at once, and the interesting question quickly becomes what else is limiting the print, which turns out not to be the nozzle.

Steps

1. Print your comparison on the 0.4 first

   Print the model once on the nozzle you already have, using settings you have already tuned, before you change anything. Otherwise you are comparing a 0.2mm nozzle against a stock profile and learning nothing about the nozzle. That first print here took about two hours and looked good, with the face and the chest armour decoration reading as slightly muddy. Those muddy areas are the thing to watch afterwards.

2. Swap the nozzle, and tell the printer

   Change the nozzle on the machine, then tell the printer itself which nozzle is fitted. This is separate from anything in the slicer and it is easy to do one and forget the other. While the hotend is apart, look at the silicone protector. Mine was full of dried filament hair and I had never cleaned it, because taking it off feels like it will tear.

   I used: Bambu Lab A1 stainless steel nozzle set, 0.2 / 0.4 / 0.6

3. Switch Bambu Studio to the 0.2 nozzle and pick a profile

   Set the nozzle diameter in Bambu Studio to 0.2, which gives you a different set of profiles. I went straight to 0.10mm High Quality rather than the standard, on the basis that if the point is detail there is no reason to start lower.

   

4. Check what carried over from your 0.4 profile

   This is the step I got wrong, and it is worth a minute of your time. Changing nozzle does not clear values you overrode on the old profile. Here the line widths were still on the 0.35mm I had set for the 0.4mm nozzle, while the 0.2 profile's own defaults are 0.22mm for most things. Anything you changed shows in orange with a reset arrow beside it, so the orange is the thing to scan for. I did not notice until the print was more than half done.

   

5. Slice, and look at what you already have

   2h1m of printing, 2h20m total, which is roughly what the 0.4mm took. Even with the wrong line widths, the detail was clearly better: the face had features, the chest armour decoration was distinct, the boot plates read as plates. Layer lines were essentially gone. That is the answer to the question in the title arriving about ten minutes into the job, before any tuning at all.

   

6. Reset properly, then try the community settings

   I reset everything except the support settings and printed again, which came out at much the same time. Then I applied a set of settings a viewer posted in the comments on the previous video, credited to Riley Allen 6032, translated from their P1S to my A1. The changes are wall loops to 2, sparse infill to 12% gyroid, top surface speed to 100, smoothing wall speed along the Z axis turned on, and on the support side wall loops from -1 to 2 with top and bottom Z distance at 0.2mm. If you cannot find the smoothing option, turn on developer mode.

   

7. Set the supports the same way

   On the Support tab, support wall loops go from the default -1 to 2, and top and bottom Z distance to 0.2mm, which is the same gap that worked on the 0.4mm nozzle. Sliced at 2h6m of printing, 2h25m total. The result was sharp: shoulder guards, the ridges on the front pouches, the boot plates. Better than the previous print, but only just, and by this point the differences are the sort you have to go looking for.

   

8. Try the Fat Dragon Games profile

   Several people suggested it, so I paid for it and ran it unmodified. 2h32m of printing, 2h54m total, so they have made speed choices of their own. The print was good and the front details looked perhaps slightly sharper than the previous one, though that is subjective and I would not want to defend it too hard. It also kept the foot intact, which nothing else managed reliably.

   I used: FDG Custom Bambu Studio Miniatures Profile

   

9. Push it as far as it goes, and watch it stop mattering

   Last attempt: 0.06mm High Quality, smoothing along Z on, wall loops back to 2, and everything slowed down. 3h36m of printing, 4h4m total, so nearly twice the first 0.2mm print. It looks excellent and I cannot see layer lines in the photographs, let alone with my eyes. But I could not honestly tell you it beats the 2h25m print by an amount worth an extra hour and a half. A couple of areas picked up stringing that the faster prints did not have, which I suspect is the speed change.

   

10. For a bigger model, spend the time where it shows

    A lot of people told me I should have used variable layer height on the previous video, and they were right. It lets you set quality per height band rather than across the whole model, so you can put the fine layers on the head and hands and leave the rest coarse. On the ogre from the 0.4mm test, the defaults sliced to eight hours. Refining only the areas I already knew were bad, the head, hands, hammer and the tops of the feet, brought it to 4h31m of printing and 5h8m total, and it came out smooth apart from one band on the right shoulder that I simply missed.

    

Where it goes wrong

What I would do differently

• Order a silicone nozzle protector at the same time as the nozzles. The set does not come with one, mine is filthy and I still have not replaced it, and it costs a couple of dollars.
• Put a modifier on the fragile areas to keep the infill up locally, instead of choosing between a strong ankle and a fast print.
• Angle the model on the plate to avoid supports on the thin parts in the first place. Nearly every defect left on these prints came from support removal rather than from the settings.
• Stop tuning earlier. Somewhere around the second or third print the changes stopped being visible without going looking for them, and the last print cost an extra hour and a half for something I would struggle to point at.