Split an STL in Bambu Studio with the Cut tool

When cutting in the slicer makes sense

If a model is slightly too tall or too wide for your printer (an A1 mini gives you a 180 mm cube, an A1 or P1S 256 mm), one or two cuts are often enough. Bambu Studio does that without leaving the slicer: the cut is instant, both halves stay in the project and the cut faces can go straight onto the plate.

It cuts one object along one plane at a time: ideal for a vase or a statue on its base, tedious for a grid of cuts in several directions.

Cutting a model step by step

1. Select the model. It may be flagged as outside the build volume; you can still cut it.
2. Press C, or click the cut icon in the toolbar above the 3D view. A cut plane appears through the model, with a settings panel.
3. Drag the arrow to move the plane, or type a height for a precise position. The rotation handles tilt the plane, but level cuts are easier to print and to line up.
4. Decide what happens to each half: keep it as it is, or have it placed on its cut face or flipped. A cut face on the plate gives a flat, support-free bottom.
5. Add connectors if you want them (next section), then perform the cut. The halves become separate objects in the object list.
6. Press A to arrange the plate, or move one half to a new plate.

If a half is still too big, select it and cut again. The lay-on-face tool (F) puts any flat face you click onto the plate.

Adding plugs and dowels

Connectors keep the halves aligned while the glue sets. In the cut panel, switch to connector editing, click on the cut face to place each one, confirm, then cut. Two types matter:

• Plug: a peg on one half and a hole in the other. Nothing extra to print, but the peg sticks out of the cut face, so that half must print cut face up or with support under the peg.
• Dowel: holes in both halves and a separate pin printed on its own. Both halves keep a flat face to print on, which usually makes dowels the better choice.

Keep connectors in solid material, away from thin walls. A pin printed at the exact size of its hole rarely slides in, so use the tolerance setting if your version has one, and measure your printer’s real clearance once with our free tolerance test. Recent versions also offer a dovetail mode, an interlocking groove that needs a well-calibrated printer. For assemblies you want to take apart, see dowels vs magnets.

Printing and assembling the parts

• Print every part with the same filament, layer height and wall count, or the texture changes across the seam.
• With more than two parts, mark each one as it comes off the plate.
• Dry-fit before gluing. Sand high spots, then glue PLA with cyanoacrylate, or large parts with epoxy. See our guide to gluing and finishing seams.

When a dedicated splitter is faster

The cut tool slows you down when:

• the model needs three or more cuts, or cuts in several directions: every resulting piece must be selected and cut again, with positions typed by hand;
• you want connectors on every cut face, placed one by one;
• you end up with a dozen parts and need to know which one goes where.

That is the job SplitSTL was built for. Pick your Bambu Lab printer and it computes a grid of cuts so every part fits the build volume, can move cuts toward thinner sections (smart cuts), adds pins, pegs or magnet pockets on every face, engraves a part number on each cut face and lays each part flat on its largest cut face. The export holds one STL per part, 3MF plates ready to slice in Bambu Studio, an illustrated assembly guide and a filament estimate. The preview runs in your browser and the first export is free.

Using another slicer? See the guides for OrcaSlicer and PrusaSlicer, or the comparison of splitting tools.