Multi-material desktop printing has mostly meant one of two compromises. You can feed many spools through a single nozzle and accept the purge waste and the wait at every swap, or you can buy a tool changer and pay for the extra hardware. InfiMech, a printer maker based in Zhejiang, is betting that makers want the second option at closer to the price of the first. As 3Dnatives reports, the company opened a Kickstarter campaign on November 10 for two machines: the MX, with six printheads, and the MX Pro, with eight. Super Early Bird pricing starts at $299 and $549 respectively.
The premise is simple. Every material loaded into the machine gets its own printhead and nozzle, so switching colours or materials means changing heads rather than pushing one filament out of a shared hotend and loading another.
Two Machines, One Architecture
The two models share the same multi-head idea but target different users.
- MX: open frame, six printheads, 220 x 220 x 220 mm build volume, aimed at PLA and PETG.
- MX Pro: enclosed, eight printheads, 300 x 300 x 300 mm build volume, chamber held at 60-65°C, with sealed filament enclosures. InfiMech lists ABS, ASA, polycarbonate, nylon and carbon-fibre composites among the materials it handles.
The split is a sensible one. PLA and PETG print well without an enclosure, and an open frame keeps the entry model's cost down. Engineering plastics like ABS, ASA and nylon are another matter: they warp, crack between layers or absorb moisture when they are not kept warm and dry. A heated chamber and sealed spool storage are the usual answers, and the MX Pro has both. It also has roughly 2.5 times the build volume of the MX, which matters for the larger functional parts those materials tend to be used for.
How the Head-Per-Material Design Works
On a single-nozzle multi-colour system, each colour change involves retracting the current filament, loading the next and purging enough material to flush the old colour out of the melt zone. InfiMech says each of those changes takes tens of seconds on single-nozzle machines. That is the company's own figure, but the basic problem is familiar to anyone who has watched a purge tower grow taller than the part beside it.
On the MX series, heads that are not printing park at the back of the machine. According to 3Dnatives, each printhead needs only one purge, at the start of the job. After that, a material change is a mechanical swap rather than a flush.
Tool changers have two well-known weak points, and InfiMech addresses both. The first is ooze: a parked nozzle full of molten plastic tends to drip, leaving strings and blobs when the head returns to the part. The company keeps parked heads cooler to prevent dripping. That creates the second problem: a cooled head has to come back up to printing temperature before it can work, and that wait can cancel out much of the time saved by skipping the purge. InfiMech's answer is induction heating, which heats the nozzle's metal directly and brings it up to temperature faster than a conventional heater cartridge.
How fast is "faster" in practice? Neither source gives a figure for the re-heat time or for a complete tool change. Those are the numbers that will decide whether the MX series beats single-nozzle machines on total print time for heavily multi-coloured models, so they are worth looking for once independent reviews appear.
Reliability Features
A machine moving up to eight heads on and off a carriage has more ways to fail than a single-hotend printer, and InfiMech has added several safeguards. Closed-loop motors detect and correct printhead position if the head is bumped, rather than carrying on with shifted layers. Sensors stop the print when material builds up on a nozzle or when filament tangles, two failures that otherwise tend to show up only after hours of wasted printing.
For flexible materials, an auxiliary feeder with a buffer lets the machines print TPU as soft as 75A. Very soft filament tends to bend and jam, which is what the buffer is meant to prevent.
What It Means for Makers
The most obvious use is multicolour printing without a large pile of purged plastic. But the more interesting cases come from having different materials ready on dedicated heads:
- Rigid and flexible in one job. With TPU on its own head, a part can combine a stiff body with soft grips, gaskets or bumpers in a single print, with no assembly afterwards.
- Easier support removal. 3Dnatives notes that PETG supports under PLA parts come off more easily, because the two materials bond poorly to each other. With a separate head for each, using a support material costs no purge waste.
- Engineering materials on the Pro. The MX Pro's heated chamber and sealed filament storage put ABS, ASA, PC, nylon and CF composites within reach, alongside the multi-head capability.
The usual caveats apply. This is a crowdfunding campaign, not a retail launch. Backers are paying for hardware that will ship in batches a few months after the campaign ends, by the company's own estimate, and Kickstarter schedules often slip. The $299 and $549 prices are Super Early Bird tiers, so later backers and eventual retail buyers should expect to pay more. Backers who made a VIP reservation get a $50 refund after the campaign closes.
InfiMech is not a new company. Its InfiMech store already lists TX and EX printer lines, with a 250 x 250 x 205 mm build volume and a speed of 600 mm/s, and the homepage carries a banner announcing the November 10 Kickstarter launch. Even so, multi-head machines are mechanically more complex than anything in that range, and a track record with single-head printers does not guarantee the same reliability with eight heads.
Bottom Line
On paper, the MX series tackles the real costs of multi-material printing: purge waste, time lost to colour changes, and the drips and re-heat delays that come with tool changers. Six heads for $299 is a low entry price for this kind of architecture, if the early-bird figure holds and the hardware arrives as described. The details that matter most, including real tool-change times, head alignment over long prints and how well cooled heads stop drips, cannot be judged from a campaign page.
Makers who want a closer look before backing will get one soon. Both machines will be shown at Formnext 2026 in Frankfurt, November 17-20, in Hall 12.0 at Stand E22.
