The 3D print community has spoken: Sovol’s M1D Kickstarter campaign has raised an incredible amount of money.
There’s an important implication of this level of support, but let’s check out the campaign first.
Sovol opened up the Kickstarter campaign for their new M1D IDEX FFF desktop 3D printer late last week. The device offers up to seven simultaneous colors/materials in a print job, and it does so in a very unique fashion.
Instead of swapping tools into a single spot on the X-axis carriage as other low-waste 3D printers do, the M1D has space for TWO tools.
One toolhead is fixed, and the other can have any of six separate tools swapped in and out. Six plus one is seven total tools. The other feature is that the two toolheads are independent: they do not move simultaneously, they can move separately along the X-axis. Along the Y-axis, they move together as the Y-axis moves. That’s IDEX: Independent Dual Extruders.
The result is a system that can print in multiple colors with almost zero waste material and five-second tool swaps: each toolhead is independently heated, making them instantly ready for action.
The concept has become wildly popular, with, as of this writing, almost 2000 backers funding around US$3M in orders.
They have a long way to go to match Snapmaker’s U1 Kickstarter campaign, but give Sovol a break: they’ve only been active for a few days.
What does all this mean? To me, it is effectively the end of “wasteful” 3D printers.
For the past two years, the go-to machine style in desktop FFF 3D printing has been the filament swapper: a device that feeds and pulls filament from a single hot end. This enables colour changes during print jobs, but also requires purging the nozzle at each swap to ensure the next colour is pure. With some jobs requiring hundreds of purges, the material cost has become outrageous for some colourful prints.
The excessive cost effectively means you’re paying a lot more for material for a given print job. Filament swappers are silently expensive.
But maybe it isn’t so silent after all. The staggering demand for Snapmaker’s U1 low-waste system, and now a massive demand for Sovol’s low-waste solution, have, for me, put a nail in the filament swapper world. Everyone knows that low-waste systems are simply better.
They are less expensive to operate because of less material required, and in many cases can perform tool changes far faster than a filament swapper: jobs complete faster.
I expect that we will see filament swappers gradually fade away from the market at this point, and low-waste solutions will reign supreme.
Via Kickstarter
