The Felix Pro 1 & 2 have a slightly larger print bed and with (from what I’ve seen) have a very good dual extrusion reliability and quality.
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Ultimaker is a great brand of 3D printers and this is a valuable addition to the range.
A dual extruder adds significant advantages to a 3d printer both for personal and professional use and the webcam is a nice feature for remotely checking your prints. NFC tagging would not have been necessary since Cura already offers printing profiles and these also differ per print. A bigger build volume would have been nice but all in all I like the specs of this machine.
It is just about 3 month that I bought an ultimaker 2+ 3D printer, but now I realize that I had to wait.
The thing I liked most was the dual extrusion and that they use PLA to support the pieces which melt with water.
I already asked to ultimaker whether they have an update to my printer and the answer was this:
“Sorry! we won’t be able to offer an upgrade kit for the Ultimaker 2 series, as too many parts have been changed between the two models.”.
How reliable would to add a dual extrusion with ulticretr? Can I invest $500us for this?
I know people who’ve made custom dual extruder set-ups for the UM original series, and I am sure it has been done for the UM2 as well. Go check out thw Ultimaker forums, I’m pretty sure there’ll be good documentation on the procedure.
I’m really not blown away by it, and while I don’t doubt Ultimaker’s quality, I am a bit skeptical of some of the design choices.
Dual extrusion via separate heads is a trend that is being moved away from in the industry for good reason. I am surprised to see them go down this route so late in the game, and I’m more than a little concerned about the longevity of the nozzle lifting mechanics. There’s a reason other manufacturer’s haven’t gone down this route; something like that requires very precise mechanics to get right every time. It is entirely possible that the nozzles “move” hundreds, if not thousands, of cycles per print (each could have to raise/lower multiple times per layer - imagine a couple thousand layer print at high resolution). It’s definitely the engineering brain raising a red flag with that - maybe I’m wrong and I hope I am, but I just don’t see that mechanism working precisely for a long period of time. Time will tell I suppose, but I’m not jumping at the gate to make a decent investment for a printer that may not work for that long.
Inclusion of the NFC also makes me a bit wary; this makes future implementation of DRM in the future very easy for the company and not something I want to deal with. Hopefully, they learned from the mistakes other companies have made with DRM and won’t even try going down that road.
My other issue is the build volume. It’s smaller than competing, similarly priced dual extrusion machines which I find kind of disappointing. I was really expecting a big volume with the UM3! I’ll make a final assessment after seeing this unit out in the wild for a couple months, and seeing how it stands up to wear and tear over time.
Once again, Ultimaker have blown our expectations out of the water with quality, features, design, and functionality.
The approach to Dual Extrusion is very interesting and definitely a lot easier than an E3D direct hotend with pneumatic connector seperated above it (An equivelant comparison to the UM3).
The webcam feature is interesting, I haven’t been able to find much information about it however the remote connectivity aspect and remote monitoring feature is something long overdue on the Ultimaker brand in my opinion.
The average price of a decently sized industrial-grade system would allow you to purchase more than 20 UM3’s. Which would give you more than 5x the build volume of the industrial system. Having multiple printers in your workshop/manufacturing line gives maximum flexibility (if 1 Ultimaker is out of use all other devices are still available, if one machine is down for maintenance the rest is still running). It can also be seen as a faster way to produce big objects, by splitting an object in different parts and printing it on multiple devices a cluster of UM3 is faster than any other big volume additive-manufacturing system available.
Upgrading UM2+ to dual extrusion is not good idea. You will have lot problems (non printing head hit object, oozing…)
Where are you from? Maybe you can try to sell UM2+ and buy UM3. UM3 is not upgrade, it is completely new machine made for new things. UM2+ is still better in many aspects (speed, material diversity, reliability)
It looks like a great semi-professionnal machine. Looking forward to get reviews of the machine. I’m especially interest in how the UM3 compares with the BCN3D.
I think that the dual extruder is the single best feature of the machine. Being able to have clean overhangs is the holy graal of fdm machines.
I have a UM2+ and I usually have to decline orders with very complex parts with nasty overhangs. Hubs with a UM3 would be able to accept a lot more orders.
The price of the UM3 seems high compared to the UM2+ but if you take into account the amount of work needed to clean parts with overhangs (many hours per month in my case), then it is not that expensive after all.
A 0.6mm nozzle for the UM3 would make the printer perfect! 0.4mm nozzle is too tight for Woodfill filaments.
Don’t get your expectations on PVA too high. It’s a difficult material to work with. I also have had a UM3 for 4 weeks now and I really love it. The hardware is great. The new Cura was very frustrating but eventually I learned how it all works. One critical understanding was the difference between “profile” and “settings”. In the old cura it was the same thing. In the new cura “profile” is a list of json formulas that set every parameter and “settigns” are the user overrides. not understanding this makes all the pop up messages useless.
But by my 8th print I found Cura to be just fine.
Again PVA is difficult. PLA sticks on top of PVA just fine (I love pla more than ever - I never quite appreciated what a wonderful material it is) but PVA barely sticks to itself let alone on top of PLA. But it works. Barely. You will figure it all out - there’s just a bunch more things to learn.
PVA with Nylon worked AMAZING. I love it. I think I might just stick to those materials. I never was all that happy with Nylon in the past (made around 30 prints in various nylons in the past) but UM nylon is great. Easier than Taulman Bridge I think.
Overall - hardware was fantastic. Software was frustrating - but by the time people get printers Cura should be in much better condition.
yup, notably ultiarjan on the ultimaker forums.
have a look here to see the (bigger) electronics changes:
https://ultimaker.com/en/community/23401-inside-the-ultimaker-3-day-4-electronics
7 months later
We just bought one for work and I can give you a viewpoint. It is largely turnkey; input a model and it produces parts w/o much specialized knowledge, as long as you stay on the reservation. It is amazing to have parts produced, w/o regard to overhangs or holes or other limitations with this ease. It works that well for material pairs it has programmed into it. If you need something else, you are on your own again.
Three items as warnings.1) the build volume listed is NOT for dual builds as that costs some space between heads. Also there are some keep-out zones that reduce usable space a bit for some shapes. Convincing it to print near the size limit is arduous. 2) The software can be uppity, single minded, and uncooperative if you need to do something the programmer had not thought of. 3) The niceties are subject to the rule of unintended consequences. The very convenient front cover of the print carriage, with its magnetic catch, makes changing hot ends easy. Up until a large part lost adhesion one night and somehow popped the cover loose. By the light of day, the failed part was not the ball of fishing line we have come to love, but because the partially open cover blocked the extrusion, it had backed up, filled the print head with molten PETT, overflowing back up into the release mechanism for both heads. I have a new appreciation for just how strong PETT is now. Also an aversion to the whole “easy to open” concept, I’m going to wire it shut with a bail. Trust me, the easy change feature failed here.
Live and learn. Other than that, yes a nice machine for business.
Just FYI there are others that have some kind of lifting mechanism and I only know of the diamond hotend that is different though very unpractical for multiple different material types. To what other manufacturer’s were you referring? Even if there will be advantages to using UM materials with RFID you will always be capable of selecting a material type manually… Because UM wants to be open for experimentation. Though marketing did want tracking of matrrial to tie it to a customer via RFID, we talked them out of that one 
We also tested the lifting mechanism extensively, we had printers doing nothing but nozzle switching for weeks, to verify wear and tear and reproducibility of position. But it is always good to see for yourself and I do agree with others is is not made or priced for home use.
Yes the 0.8mm nozzle is veing tested ATM and some smaller then 0.4 mm nozzles will be comming in for testing soon, ofcourse I have no idea what and when it will be released by marketing. The advantage over something cobbled together (there is a retrofit of a um core you can put your choise of nozzle size on, find it on the um forums) is that the machine will know the nozzle size and adjust accordingly (for instance during xy calibration) and notify cura of the size. Same goes for material type, that is also synced to cura and that is one of the advantages of RFID imho.
4 months later
check out these guys, they semed to like it a lot