Multec Unveils M1000: High-Temperature, Six-Material Industrial 3D Printer

Multec announced a massive new industrial 3D printer, the M1000, which is not only high temperature capable, but also handles six materials.

Multec is a very interesting German company that only started selling products in 2019. Their main claim to fame is a totally ingenious six-material toolhead that is both efficient and fast.

Traditional multimaterial approaches for 3D printers all have issues of one kind or another:

• Dual extrusion: an extra extruder is bolted onto the first one, but the “other” extruder drips onto and bumps into the print.
• IDEX: independently moving extruders, solves those issues, but is more expensive to produce and is slower as the print heads must move around more.
• Single Nozzle: material is blended or switched in a nozzle fed by multiple filaments, but when switching materials huge amounts of purged material are wasted. While alignment problems are solved, many more are introduced.
• Toolchanger: A single motion system swaps toolheads in and out during the print job. This solves most issues, but is far more expensive due to additional hardware required and is somewhat slower due to all the toolhead movements.

Instead of those techniques, Multec’s six-way approach involves a rotating metal plate under the six ready-to-go hot ends. The plate has a hole to allow one of the six to extrude, while blocking the other five. This eliminates drips and there is no requirement for purging or tool changing. The plate can be rotated into position in only 0.2s, basically instant. You can read more about this amazing toolhead here.

The company has several 3D printers in their catalog, but now they’ve developed a new and very large machine in cooperation with partner Reichenbacher Hamuel.

The new M1000 is, as you might guess from the product name, a large device that has a build volume of 1000 x 1000 x 1000 mm. The machine is enabled for high temperature 3D printing, with a maximum plate temperature of 250C and an actively heated chamber maximum temperature of an incredible 350C. The six hot ends can reach 400C.

The M1000 has specialized insulation and cooling to ensure the toolheads and other components can operate well in spite of the high temperature environment in the build chamber.

These extreme temperatures enable the M1000 to competently 3D print a wide range of high temperature engineering materials, including ULTEM and PEEK.

High temperature 3D printers are somewhat rare, and even rarer are high temperature machines that can print more than one material. Two, I believe is the maximum. However, the M1000 is capable of printing SIX different materials in a single job — all with high temperature materials.

This begs the question, are there even six high temperature materials you’d want to print in a single job?

For sure one of the six will be a high temperature soluble support material. This would enable the M1000 to easily handle extremely complex geometries with embedded support that cannot be physically removed. But what about the other materials?

Would there be a case for printing ULTEM and PEEK, for example, in the same part? Would there be third, fourth and fifth high temperature materials as well? I suspect the number of use cases here might be quite limited.

Another approach would be to set up the M1000 with a variety of high temperature materials and soluble support. Then a series of 3D print jobs could be sent to the printer, and each can choose from the five different model materials ready to go on the machine. This could save the labor required to swap filaments that otherwise would be required on lesser machines. That would be best used by a company frequently changing high temperature materials.

Another possibility would be to load five spools of the same material onto five toolheads. The idea here would be to automatically switch to the next toolhead when the first spool runs out. This basically makes the M1000 a 5X spool capacity machine, and we don’t know the maximum spool size it can accommodate. However, this switching would require some firmware and software for the machine and I’m not sure if this has been implemented.

In any case, the new M1000 seems like quite an interesting and versatile industrial 3D printer.

Via Multec