Ultimaker S3

The Ulti­makers use a tech­no­logy called Fused Fil­a­ment Fab­ric­a­tion (FFF) or Fused Depos­ition Mod­el­ling (FDM). This tech­no­logy works by mov­ing a print­head and depos­it­ing melted fil­a­ment on a hot build plate to slowly build up lay­ers which form an object.

Our Ulti­makers print in PLA plastic and are good gen­er­al-pur­pose print­ers with a high enough level of accur­acy for lots of projects.

The Ulti­maker S3 has dual extru­sion nozzles to allow print­ing in either two dif­fer­ent col­ours or one col­our and a dis­solv­able PVA sup­port mater­i­al. This is use­ful when work­ing with prints that have com­plex over­hangs that would be dif­fi­cult to clean up if they were prin­ted on a single nozzle FDM printer.

While 3D print­ing can be a use­ful fab­ric­a­tion meth­od for many pro­jects, it is a slow pro­cess and best used for pro­to­typ­ing and low-volume manufacturing. 

Try to avoid using 3D print­ing and use oth­er work­shop machinery for sim­pler shapes, which is usu­ally faster and more efficient.

Pro­jects that need spe­cif­ic or cus­tom­ised parts that would be tricky to make in any oth­er way.

Phys­ic­al pro­duc­tion of CAD mod­els that have been designed or down­loaded. This can include any­thing from: parts for robots, ele­ments of mech­an­ic­al mech­an­isms, archi­tec­tur­al mod­els, art­work, or even mini­ature char­ac­ters for table top gaming.

Mod­els that are gen­er­ated from scanned data such as MRI, laser scans or photogrammetry.

• PLA (White) - 2.85mm
• PVA (Natural) - 2.85mm

To use this tool, you will need to book and attend a tool train­ing session. 

Once you have com­pleted a tool train­ing, you will be able to drop into our work­shop dur­ing open­ing hours to use this tool. Please note that access to this tool depends on wheth­er a suit­ably trained tech­ni­cian is avail­able at the time of your visit.