Modern multi-material printers certainly have their advantages, but all that purging has a way to add up to oodles of waste. Tool-changing printers offer a way to do multi-material prints without the purge waste, but at the cost of complexity. Plastic’s cheap, though, so the logic has been that you could never save enough on materials cost to make up for the added capital cost of a tool-changer — that is, until now.
Currently active on Kickstarter, the Snapmaker U1 promises to change that equation. [Albert] got his hands on a pre-production prototype for a review on 247Printing, and what we see looks promising.
The printer features the ubiquitous 235 mm x 235 mm bed size — pretty much the standard for a printer these days, but quite a lot smaller than the bed of what’s arguably the machine’s closest competition, the tool-changing Prusa XL. On the other hand, at under one thousand US dollars, it’s one quarter the price of Prusa’s top of the line offering. Compared to the XL, it’s faster in every operation, from heating the bed and nozzle to actual printing and even head swapping. That said, as you’d expect from Prusa, the XL comes dialed-in for perfect prints in a way that Snapmaker doesn’t manage — particularly for TPU. You’re also limited to four tool heads, compared to the five supported by the Prusa XL.
The U1 is also faster in multi-material than its price-equivalent competitors from Bambu Lab, up to two to three times shorter print times, depending on the print. It’s worth noting that the actual print speed is comparable, but the Snapmaker takes the lead when you factor in all the time wasted purging and changing filaments.
The assisted spool loading on the sides of the machine uses RFID tags to automatically track the colour and material of Snapmaker filament. That feature seems to take a certain inspiration from the Bambu Labs Mini-AMS, but it is an area [Albert] identifies as needing particular attention from Snapmaker. In the beta configuration he got his hands on, it only loads filament about 50% of the time. One can only imagine the final production models will do better than that!
In spite of that, [Albert] says he’s backing the Kickstarter. Given Snapmaker is an established company — we featured an earlier Snapmaker CNC/Printer/Laser combo machine back in 2021— that’s less of a risk than it could be.
Idk but on my single nozzle dual extruder setup all that purging adds up to about a half gram on smaller prints up to 1.5g on larger prints and that could be improved by making the purge tower smaller. Is anyone wasting 10s of grams per print in purge material?
Well, just today, Bambu Lab teasered their new Vortek system, which shares the induction heating and hotend-changer approach with Bondtech’s INDX. Filament handling is different, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rluJj3NEdQA
I guess a system that changes the whole head will be outdated very soon.
Hmm to get this one or to get a Prusa Core with better local support…
I love the idea of a tool changer, but not with just different hotends. If you got 4 tools, maybe do FDM printer head, laser engraver, vinyl cutter and rotary tool for cutting wood/steel. I don’t really see a point in 4 different heads besides maybe different nozzle sizes. .4, .6, .8, 1.0 mm could work, but I don’t think i’d ever use that. Different tool heads for different things would be cool.
Unfortunately the chassis needs to be strong for CNC cutting. Now you’ve made it more expensive for people who just want 3D printing. Plus it’s a compromise, so it’s awful for CNC anyway.
Can we fix it? No. We can’t.
The sort of motion system you want for a 3D printer is very different to the kind you need for a router/mill. Laser and vinyl cutting are between these extrema, but this seems like a case where optimising for one compromises all of the others.
I understand the reason for changing hotends in this instance is to remove the “filament poop” of a filament switching system.
Bambu offer combo printer/laser/vinyl/plotter units (No rotary tool though) – the H2D & new H2S