January at the Laboratory
January at the lab is always an interesting time. Two years ago, in January of 2024, we launched the Chube Hotend, and opened preorders. It was an exciting, stressful, and wonderful time. It was just Luke and I, and he had just left his job as Engineering Manager. We made a huge leap of faith to go all-in with the business, and it was an insane time in more ways than I can count.
In January of 2025, we were making beta parts for Chube Compact. It was then that we first realized that in-housing machining may be required, not just desired. That same month, we brought on our first full-time staff member, and we are so glad we did! Luke was also perfecting the Pika hotend, and we began preparations for that launch as well.
This January is no different! we are deep into building our entire manufacturing process, so we can assemble and ship high-quality hotends to our amazing supporters. To be frank, there is zero way we would be able to list Chube Compact or Pika Hotends at the current pricing without making them ourselves. The machine shop we utilized in the before-times was bought out, and the pricing went up dramatically, even on open orders. We ran the numbers, and we would not be able to continue making hotends in the USA at those prices.
So, that is where the Swiss came in. We realized that the only way to continue making products, was to do it ourselves. We felt tired, worried, and quite stressed. We had to decide to either double-down, and go in deeper, or to give up on additive manufacturing altogether. We are made of strong stuff, and Luke and I both decided it was time to double-down. We didn't want to have any regrets, or to look back and wonder. We knew that even if we failed, we would at least know we gave it our best shot. And so here we are. Luke is learning to be a machinist, and we are doing our very best to provide quality products for additive manufacturing through subtractive manufacturing.
Compact Progress
Titanium:
Our first shipment of Titanium arrived on 1/6/2026, and unfortunately, the box was extremely damaged. I could see bent bars from 8ft away, and we determined that we could not accept the shipment. Any amount of bending in a bar means that we cannot use that bar. Thankfully, we purchase insurance for our freight, and we will (hopefully) not incur charges for the denied material.
On 1/7/2026, we spoke with both the shipping company, as well as the shipper, and it was determined that they would attempt delivery again, and we could accept it, and pick through each individual bar. They said that any bars that were unusable, we could get refunded on. This is very good news, because it means we can run *some* of the titanium needed while any additional material is sourced and shipped.
On 1/9/2026 we received the same shipment again, after being told that we would be refunded for any bars in the shipment that were unusable. We documented the arrival state, and will be going through the shipment bar by bar while documenting.
Heaters and PT1000s:
We were informed that these will be shipping in 1-2 weeks! We anticipate that these may be stuck in customs for some time before they arrive, maybe a couple of weeks tops.
All in all, heaters and PT1000s will be here in 4-5 weeks.
As they come with the hotends, we can’t ship until they are here, and after we have done our Quality Control process.
Labels:
These are safe here at the lab, and we love how they turned out! I didn't want to share them until they ship, but everyone has been waiting so patiently. Here is a sneak peak!
Heatsinks:
Not ready yet, but this is one of the first parts Luke made on our machine many months ago! The hardest part of machining these parts, is perfecting the “recipe,” which is already complete for this part. It will only take a couple of days of machine-time to make all of these.
Assembly:
It will take time to assemble and ship all of the hotends. My estimate is that assembly will take a couple of weeks. We have a lot of hotends to assemble!
Thank you:
As a thank you to all of you for waiting so patiently for us to learn how to “Swiss,” we will be sending all of our direct customers a complimentary FIN6 .4 Plated Copper nozzle. FIN6 is simply a V6 nozzle, with FIN exterior geometry. It will work in your Chube Compact, or any other hotend that takes a V6 nozzle. We have tested them in house, and are quite happy with their performance, and expect that across the board they'll have better PA performance due to a more gradual taper. Customers who purchased through another vendor will be able to receive a deep discount on this nozzle instead.
Pika Hotend Progress
Nozzles: The .4, .5, and .6 copper nozzles are complete (minus plating). Luke still needs to machine .2, .8, and 1mm copper nozzles, and then the hardened steel. Now that he has figured out the recipe for machining the copper nozzles, the rest of the sizes will be easy, (Luke made over 1,000 .6 nozzles between edits of this post!) except for .2 We expect .2 nozzles to be more difficult due to reasons Luke understands, and I (Audrina) do not.
Check out some of our copper scrap!
The hardened steel nozzles will be much easier to machine than the copper ones, as copper tends to be tricky. Luke has machined steel before, and it was much simpler than our specialty copper alloy.
From Luke: Seriously, this is wicked stuff, never cuts a chip, tends to get wrapped all over tools & breaks them! Every broken tool has a risk of damaging another tool, meaning a single breakage could be ~2-4hrs of setup, sorting & re-validation!!!
This is after I purchased chipbreaking inserts specifically ground for copper. Instead, to get good parts without breaking tools every 100 parts, I've had to carefully craft my toolpaths, ensuring that any windings get removed before transferring to any damage-prone locations. This has been painful with literal dozens of iterations which have to be manually proved out and watched for 20+ cycles before being able to take my eyes off the machine, each time.
I even wound up building my own website with basic tools for machining with all the features I thought were missing from legacy calculators or were slowing me down with conversions. I hope its helpful to someone other than me!
Heatsinks: Because the heatsinks are aluminum, this will be much easier to machine than other components were.
Heatbreaks: The material for the Titanium Heatbreaks has arrived! These will be coated with our special heatbreak treatment out of house when they are done being machined. Titanium, while being something that Luke hasn't personally cut, is something well understood by toolmakers and other machinists alike, so the rampup time should be significantly shorter. The slimmer rods seen below are for your heatbreaks!
Packaging mockup: I hate not having much to share with you all, so I am also sharing a packaging mockup I have for the hotends.
Pika Performance: We have been testing the pre-plated parts in the lab as we make them. The good news, is that the parts are working incredibly well!! Check out the image below!
General Assembly plans:
Once the heatbreaks are complete, we will be sending them, the blocks, and the nozzles all out for plating. They have a 1-2wk lead time with our existing vendors, and will all come back ready to be installed.
In that time, we will be turning heatsinks, meaning that by the time those are finished being manufactured, it will all be ready!
We will be utilizing some extra help from local family to assemble your hotends, all facilitated by standardized work instructions and should make the assembly process quicker than it could be.
Ship Dates in General
Everyone keeps pinging us directly, or asking our support channels, generating tickets, commenting on Kickstarter, etc.
We see them all.
We're not ignoring you.
We want to promise exact dates. At this point, the best we can truly offer is to keep posting honest, transparent updates as to our progress & what's going on.
That doesn't mean we aren't or won't keep working hard. I'm (Luke) am writing this at 7am after my 3rd all-nighter in the last week and a half coming back from the holidays, and Audrina woke up early and is beside me as we finish this up.
If you want a date/time to think about, target Pika shipments in earlyish February, and Compact shipments end of February. (Please, please don't ask for personal updates to random pings, emails, or support tickets, you'll get a link to this or the newest blog post without further text).
Every time I solve a problem or a puzzle, I get better at addressing the next one ahead of time or better at solving on the fly, and the materials that are next in queue get considerably easier on the learning curve regardless. I just didn't plan on starting my journey 3 months late due to machine install issues on top of compounding other sales and configuration issues.
We're out here fighting our endurance and machines to get you your parts you've trusted us to make, and we're going to do our best to get you them as soon as possible.
We'll try to keep our pace of updates going. Writing a somewhat easy to follow, comprehensive update takes a lot of time. Its honestly one of the reasons why it is such large gaps between updates, we want to do it right and add in all that's happened, and the scope just grows and grows.
General Laboratory News
New Staff Member:
We have brought on a Manufacturing Operations Lead, and believe that this new staff member will aid us in optimizing our manufacturing processes now and in the future. They are slated to start at the end of the month, 1/26!
Frankly, we know this need has existed for quite some time, but we can only grow so quickly. We do not want to hire staff that we cannot afford to keep, and give regular hours to. It has been incredibly important to us from the beginning, to hire people in a sustainable manner.
Once our new staff member starts, we will be up to 4 fulltime staff members (including Luke and I) plus our three part-time staff! We know that we are small, but we have big dreams, and your patience has not gone unappreciated as we ramp up.
New Products:
Filament: Our new Two Step Filament colors are currently being manufactured! The next colors we are stocking (aside from black) are Makita Blue, Natural, and Violet. The material we are stocking these in first, is ABS-GF. We are hoping to have these in-hand at the end of January, or some time in February.
From Luke: How were we able to test this already? When our Bambu Pikas aren't ready yet? Simple. The hotend is fundamentally the same. Prior to Formnext, we had ordered externally a few sample heatsinks&breaks from a quick-turn vendor, and when we got blocks&nozzles off our internal manufacture, we put them together and *boom* - we installed our U1 Pika in our fresh-from-kickstarter U1 before we had even turned it on, it calibrated without skipping a beat, and off to the races!
Look - You hate it, we hate it, but the reality is is that we don't have investors or have a warchest to draw from while we make these products. Every preorder has kept our lights on and our staff paid, especially as the timeline has stretched out of hand due to external and internal delays.
Every product sold really does directly go into keeping us afloat and food on the table. Scaling to make such plentiful, high quality products isn't cheap, between rent, equipment, software, and the time investment, we've really stretched ourselves thin.
In addition, preorders let us gauge demand. If we only make 200 heatsinks for the U1, but turns out you guys want 1,000, we'd need to significantly rearrange our production or risk the similar backorder situation we're currently in just getting worse! By preordering, you allow us to be efficient and to help us keep our pricing as low as we can make it.
Its with that reality in mind that we will yet again open up another option for preordered products with the Pika Hotend for Snapmaker U1!
The shared components between Pika and U1 Pika mean that fulfillment will directly follow Bambu Pika, as the only unique component, the heatsink for the U1, can and will be manufactured in the same setup (which is the most time-intensive portion of how we make parts, right now) and the rest of the setup is the same.
The U1 has a compatible heater and therm setup that we were able to directly transfer from the stock hotend to the Pika, and will fully benefit from Pika's enhanced rigidity, flowrate, and hot-swappable nozzles (don't have to tear apart each tool to change nozzle size! whoopee!).
We'll be listing these for preorder prices of $90/ea for single, $82/ea for two pack, and $75 ea for the 4 pack, each with either a copper, hardened steel, or tungsten carbide FIN nozzle of your choice (tungsten carbide extra). The bulk discount will be added in cart.
We think they offer an excellent value (similar to the u1, which is very impressive sofar! due to no longer needing to buy multiple hotends, swap them out of the toolhead (dealing with electronics) and other annoying parts of swapping hotends not nozzles. In addition, we've been able to get over 42mm3/s compared to the stock hotends 24mm3/s in PLA, without the use of CHT geometry (these were our unplated, in-house copper nozzles).
Stock (24mm3/s) (Right) vs Pika (42mm3/s) (Left)
Other Pikas:
We have a few other Pika models that we've been running internally in the farm that have been delighting us with with performance. We showed off the prototypes we would be running at Formnext, and will be getting more into the hands of our #twostepgang for additional testing before bringing them to market, ideally without a preorder.
They all will be using FIN nozzles, expanding compatibility across printer brands, as each OEM continues to be fragmented with nozzle and hotend compatibility.
Jupiter:
Take this survey if you're interested in the Jupiter toolboard. Will help me plan an eventual groupbuy/beta plan where we can get as many out as possible.
Testing has been waylaid by myself (Luke) being busier than I ever thought possible, but should march forward.
3D Printers for sale:
We'll be rearranging our shop as we morph into a more assembly-focused build, and our farm has outgrown the installed power we have in our printing area.
Prices Negotiable. Make a reasonable offer. Shipping Not included. Biz@Lukeslabonline.com for questions and offers. Will provide pictures as asked, I just don't have them right now.
We have for sale:
2x 500x500x500 Stablebot Core 3d Printers - $12,000/ea, preassembled, ~2-3wk leadtime for shipment.
- Ballscrew Z
- 500/240/105c Hotend/Bed/Chamber max continuous temps
- Actively Heated Chamber
- Individual Magnets in Bed
- Kalico Firmware
- Beacon
- Chube Conduction
- LGX Pro
500x500x500 Stablebot Core $5000
- 500/115 Hotend/Bed/Chamber max continuous Temps
- Acrylic Enclosure
- Kalico Firmware
- Beacon
- Chube Air
- Orbiter 2.0
1x 580x580x990 LabMagus Plus - $18,000 - 2wk leadtime for shipment
- 500/110/80c Hotend/Bed/Chamber max continuous Temps
- Active Chamber Heat
- Kalico Firmware
- Beacon
- Chube Conduction
- LGX Pro extruder
- Duet 6hc
- 48v operation across the board
Notes:
Was a prototype machine, has a few extra holes :)
1x 550x550x990 Stablebot Pro - $18,000 - 4wk leadtime
- 500/125/80c Hotend/Bed/Chamber max continuous Temps
- IDEX Chube Conduction+LGX Pro
- Kalico Firmware
- Beacon
- 8080 Frame
Notes:
Initial Prod Machine - Size is overlapping IDEX nozzle range
