Prusa Ships CORE One+ Gen 2 with Bondtech INDX Toolchanger System

Prusa Research has officially started shipping the first batch of Bondtech INDX conversion kits while opening direct orders for complete Prusa CORE One+ (Gen 2) machines featuring the integrated INDX system. The updated machine is offered in both assembled and kit forms, featuring choices between 4-tool and 8-tool toolchanger setups. Conversion kit orders have also been reopened for existing CORE One owners seeking to add multi-material toolchanging capabilities to their desktop setups.

Technical Capabilities of the INDX System

The INDX platform is engineered to deliver fast multi-material and multi-colour 3D printing without relying on traditional purge towers or lengthy filament retraction cycles. By utilising independent toolheads rather than a single extruder switching filaments through a shared hotend, the system dramatically reduces both toolchange latency and filament wastage.

Rapid Toolchanges and Low-Waste Priming

According to Prusa, the INDX setup achieves a toolchange time of approximately 12 seconds from the final extrusion of one tool to the first extrusion of the next on the printed model. The system employs an induction heating mechanism combined with low-mass nozzles, allowing rapid heating and cooling cycles on inactive tools. Instead of building large prime towers on the print bed, the toolhead primes outside the active print area, consuming roughly 13 milligrams of filament per tool change. The purged priming pellets are ejected in a consolidated form designed for straightforward filament recycling.

Sensors and Drive Mechanisms

Each toolhead incorporates dynamic dual-drive gears with large-diameter drive wheels that automatically adjust grip pressure based on the specific material loaded upon tool pickup. Mesh bed levelling and toolhead offsets are managed via loadcell bed sensing, accelerometers, and eddy current sensors with ambient noise cancellation to ensure consistent first-layer quality across all toolheads.

Nozzle Specifications and Abrasive Material Guidance

Prusa clarified that the toolheads in this release ship with surface-hardened nozzles rather than fully hardened units. Manufacturer testing indicates these nozzles perform reliably with standard non-abrasive thermoplastics, including PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU, and soluble support materials like PVA and BVOH.

However, for makers printing filled or highly abrasive filaments, the surface-hardened nozzles will experience accelerated wear. Prusa estimates a service life of roughly 10 kg with PETG-CF or 0.5 kg with highly abrasive filaments per nozzle. Workshops dedicated to high-volume carbon-fibre or composite printing may need to factor nozzle replacement cycles into their maintenance workflows while further nozzle testing continues.

What This Means for South African Makers

For South African print farms, design studios, and hobbyists, multi-tool desktop printing offers a clean route to combining rigid structures with flexible gaskets, integrated soluble support structures, or distinct material combinations without wasting massive amounts of filament on purge blocks. Because imported engineering filaments and support materials carry significant local costs in Rand, minimising purge waste directly improves unit economics for multi-material jobs.

Local workshops considering the upgrade should evaluate their primary material choices. Standard production using PETG, PLA, or TPU is fully supported out of the box, but high-volume composite printing will require active spare nozzle management until fully hardened nozzle variants are made available.

DC3D’s Take

Multi-tool toolchanging is widely regarded as the cleanest engineering solution for complex multi-material additive manufacturing. By bypassing single-extruder filament switching, the INDX system eliminates main friction points like cross-contamination, colour bleeding, and excessive material waste.

Prusa’s transparency regarding nozzle hardness and clear wear expectations for composite materials is a welcome detail for technical operators planning their maintenance schedules. While multi-tool systems introduce additional mechanical complexity and calibration considerations, the reduction in cycle times and material overhead makes this a highly practical direction for serious desktop production.