We dream big at E3D and we like to celebrate success. Today, however, is an anniversary that comes with some bittersweet memories for our team, for close friends & family, and also for the industry who watched our progress from the start. Four years ago today we very sadly lost our friend and co-founder, Sanjay Mortimer. In true Sanjay spirit & in his memory, I’m here to share a story.
It’s March 21 2018, and E3D announces its research & development platform, the E3D ToolChanger and Motion System. The objective with ToolChanger is to change the market and create a step-change in FDM 3D printing. Sanjay has been hiding in a dark corner of R&D with Greg, incubating this incredible project built around a CoreXY platform, for over a year by now. With provenance for tool-changing in FDM going all the way back to Bath University and the early days of RepRap, we weren’t the first to play with tool changing automation, but we were the first to bring it to the community in a refined, repeatable & precise mechanism designed to inspire innovation and create a step-change in the capabilities of desktop 3D printers. We shipped 1000s of units, many of which are in active use in university research departments around the globe.
Here's a reminder of our objectives with E3D ToolChanger, all of which were achieved:
- Be able to use dissimilar tools in one print.
- No human interaction during printing.
- Use more that two toolheads in one print.
- Create an extendable, future-proofed system.
- Share the source: our fundamental business model at the time was focused on open source, as was a lot of the industry.
Without going on about point 5 too much, time has moved on. These days it’s a pipedream to be truly open source and profitable, and we all find ourselves treading new paths hoping for one that finds a healthy balance, protecting the market from poor copies, protecting our livelihoods in the industry we have all fallen in love with, whilst also ensuring innovation is not stifled.
Now behind the scenes, for those who knew Sanjay even a little, you’ll be able to picture him chuckling with glee at the sheer quantity of HotEnds he might inevitably need to supply to the market if every printer had not one but several toolheads. But we were also thinking even bigger: what if we can literally change the way humanity manufactures goods?
It's no surprise then that, the following year, E3D’s core mission became exactly that. We have always been striving to change manufacturing forever, and now we live and breathe this with those six words on every all-staff meeting template, in every business review, and integral to every decision we make: will this contribute to changing everything? Manufacturing in print farms, across all industries, in home offices, in Santa’s workshop: everything can change, just like tools can.
Fast-forward to now. It’s 2025: Tool-changing systems are rife. From the most heavily influenced design, the Prusa XL, to the swathe of new systems coming to market right now (H2C Vortek, Snapmaker U1, Bondtech INDX and more) to say tool-changing is becoming a thing would be a massive understatement. That’s 7.5 years since we brought out the innovative E3D ToolChanger, and half the age of the entire desktop FDM industry. We are celebrating hard, and I know Sanjay would be too.
Josh & Dave continue to encourage wild sparks of creativity & nurture them into exciting technologies in dark corners of the R&D offices, many of which will be on a 3D printer near you, soon™.
Of course, the E3D team is still working on the next steps towards not just changing 3D printing, and not just changing tools, but changing the face of industry. We hope you are enjoying the journey as much as we are!
