this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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Bambu Lab announces the Vortek H2C, an automatic nozzle-changing version of the H2D (blog.bambulab.com)
submitted 1 week ago by TheRealKuni@piefed.social to c/3dprinting@lemmy.world
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Seems like Bambu Lab has a new trick for reducing waste. Rather than a toolchanger like the Prusa XL or the Snapmaker, they're swapping just the nozzle. As far as I can tell from the video, the printer still has a second nozzle which won't swap in and out, meaning a print can be run with 7 nozzles (six from the Vortek system, plus the second nozzle in the toolhead). So if you're using 7 or fewer filaments, no pooping is necessary.

The cool bit here is that they're using wireless chips in the nozzles to communicate the thermistor data to the printer, so no pin-based connections are needed.

Pretty cool solution, I think. I assume you'd still need a prime tower, but that's a small amount of waste if they're eliminating poop from purging the nozzles.

I'm curious to see how they'll handle calibration, surely the nozzles aren't all going to be perfectly aligned all the time.

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[–] TheRealKuni@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don’t know if it will be faster than a tool changer (I doubt it, but I suspect the difference will be pretty negligible), but it will be much faster than swapping material the way it has been. Purging the plastic from the nozzle takes a while, especially if swapping between, say, PETG/PCTG and PLA for support purposes. Or PVA for that matter. Basically anything where mixing the filaments can compromise the structural integrity of the result you need additional purging.

The time it takes to retract filament into the AMS and then send out the new is pretty small. The longest part of the process is the purging.

Obviously a tool changer is a solid solution to this problem, but I gotta be honest I’m curious to see how this one plays out. And it never hurts to have more solutions to a problem within the industry.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am currently unable to time it exactly,but for the AMS 1 I think it was around 30sec. for a full load/unload between cutting and reinserting (which is amongst the most error prone part of filament handling imho). But yeah, purging time is of course even more time consuming - but there is simply zero chance a toolchanger won't still be faster. (And more flexible)

The major benefit of Bambus approach?

There is literally zero chance of people using third party nozzles in their approach. But yeah, I am also curious to see how it plays out. It might end with a new January-Disaster for Bambu Lab. Or not.

And I find it extremely funny, that the video and blog post is so clearly aimed at Snapmaker. That's incredibly funny,imho.

[–] TheRealKuni@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

That’s a really good point about the nozzles.