Hi guys. Am quite interested in the MarkForged printers but can’t do without dissolvable support material. I’ve contacted MarkForged about it, told them all they need is a simple plastic extruder for water-soluble filaments like Airwolf Hydrofill (which is known to stick quite well to nylons; E3D “Scaffold” might be another material of interest) plus the appropriate mod in their Eiger software, but they don’t seem to care what potential customers think and kept acting like I was asking them to develop a material from scratch instead of just add a basic extruder.
So, has anyone ever tried to mod their printer to attach another print head to print soluble support? (Then I guess you’d have to modify the G-code to switch to the new head only when printing soluble support)
While I guess you could mod a machine to have another print head.
There is no way you could get the printer to along with the scheme.
They may use standard gcode, but it has been encoded in some way to be unreadable if you try to open one of the files.
And Eiger, the software that runs the printers, would never support adding a second head.
The only way I could see it working is to gut one of the printers of its controller and graft in a new one.
But at that point you could have just built your own dual head printer and just used Onyx with soluble support in there.
You would lose the fiber reinforcement but at least it could be made to work and probably cost a lot less than a Markforged.
In their defense the supports they make from Onyx are some of the nicest and easiest to remove I have used on any printer.
They also released an update yesterday to change the way support is generated.
It saves on material costs and print time significantly on parts that require large amounts of support.
Of course this comes 2 days after I printed a single part that took 3 days and used half a spool worth of support material 
It’s a cool machine but they’re on the proprietary materials business model. They don’t want you to use any consumables other than the very expensive ones that they sell. Therefore, you are actually asking them to develop a material. This is why I would never buy a machine that uses proprietary materials.
-Jesse
2 Likes
Interesting… too bad they can’t be content with the great markup they’ve got to be getting with their nylon and especially their coated fibers.
I agree but I’m sure they will be patent-squatting on their 2d fiber reinforcement for many years to come
Well, good to hear that supports are easy to remove… my application would probably have supports in very hard-to-reach places, but I guess if people can build ships in bottles I could also remove those supports. But dissolvable support is so much easier… not to mention cheaper than using Onyx!
Too bad MarkForged needs to be stubborn and throw away business…
Just chiming in here…Onyx supports are wicked easy to deal with. If you don’t want to pay for the cost of fiber, then get thier Onyx only printer for around $3k. Having dealt with ABS and PLA FDM printers for years, dissolvable support material is nice but you pull the Onyx materials away in minutes and you’re done!!! No waiting another hour or two. Also, when I tell my customers the complexity of thier part, printing, linear, supports, etc most will they let me edit the file for better print results. I’m sure you folks could do the same with your parts. Cyanoacrylate anyone? Markforged is always trying to better themselves, give it time kids, they are barely a 3 year old startup company, they are just getting warmed up!
Fair enough, maybe I just got a salesperson who wasn’t willing to listen to customers.
In the past couple of years much better dissolvable support materials have come out. E.g. Hydrofill bonds great to ABS and dissolves in water in 24hrs…
In our case, we are making scores or even hundreds of interconnected parts–gluing would be very difficult and defeat the purpose of using MarkForged for higher strength I imagine… But maybe it is a nieche demand, who knows…
The base Onyx One is the machine I use.
It has been a great machine with no real issues.
I have gotten a single bad roll of nylon from Markforged that refused to print.
But they overnighted me a replacement and it has been smooth sailing since then.
