How often are you changing nozzles? I can't think I've ever done it except for swapping out the manufacturer supplied brass with a hardened steel after or arrives
How often are you changing nozzles? I can't think I've ever done it except for swapping out the manufacturer supplied brass with a hardened steel after or arrives
For tabletop gaming I'm switching between nozzles pretty regularly, so I can have fine detail on small minatures and faster prints for bigger terrain, bases, scatter and grid pieces.
I'm not changing out nozzles daily, but I do sometimes make small parts that need the .2mm nozzle. Not for gaming or miniatures, but typically mechanical interfaces where the .2mm nozzle gives a better result.
But then for most stuff I use a .6mm high flow nozzle.
It's worth noting though that this part of the game is about to change majorly for both brands.
Prusa is widely known to launch their next-generation tool changer at Formnext in Nov, which is going to be a concept where you have a rack of nozzle+heatpipe+filament tube tools that the print head grabs and heats up inductively. And Bambu is more or less working on something similar they will probably launch some time next year.
This is totally changing the "nozzle swap" equation. It means purge-free and much faster multi-material printing without outright duplicating print heads like the XL does, and the ability to park and mix nozzle sizes as well.
It'll be cool to see which company pulls it off better. As someone who was never convinced by either Bambu's shoddy and wasteful AMS or Prusa's ridiculously humongous MMU+Buffer approach, this is the leap I've been waiting for for an upgrade.
Edit: Amazing move to downvote a comment that simply and neutrally adds new information to the thread.
Prusa is going to use Bondtech's upcoming INDX system, which swaps out the entire filament path.
Bambu Vortek seems to just be swapping nozzles so, while that should cut down on waste, it's going to be much slower (XL is already much faster than AMS based printers but comes at a substantial price increase).
INDX tool changes are expected to be around 8-12 seconds. Vortek would be probably be around 30+ seconds.
Interesting, yeah. I'm mainly interested in making multi-material faster without upping to the size of an XL, so it looks like the Prusa solution would be a better fit for my needs personally.
If Bambu are only swapping nozzles it also means they still need something AMS-like to swap the filament path, which somehow feels a bit clunky. I think having seperate filament paths is overall a cleaner and simpler design.
Someone's made an animation of how they think it'll look like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YNSlx0GJ5Ig
No need to speculate, Bambu posted a video of their design:
https://youtu.be/rluJj3NEdQA
Maybe because you're incorrect about the AMS being the problem? The AMS merely feeds the correct filament. It's not the fault of the AMS that the printer doesn't have multiple nozzles.
The problem with the AMS is it feeds all the filaments into one nozzle so it requires a purge every time the color changes. There are other filament spool designs without this problem.