I Put 300 Hours on the Snapmaker U1. Here’s the Truth.

0:10 I've put almost 300 hours of print time and over 10,000 tool changes on the new Snapmaker U1 3D printer over the past few weeks. Today, I'll tell you everything you need to know about it. At the tail end of 2025, this machine had a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, raising a record-breaking 20 million US dollars. On April 10th, 2026, direct orders opened for the U1. So no more lead time, no more pre-orders, pay your $899 and this machine is on its way to your doorstep. Let's do a print and we can talk a little bit about what's changed between the early review unit I received in fall of last year and the final release unit being shipped out today. This is a cute little bug from Hollow Knight.

1:01 Printed in three colors, gray, white and black for the eyes. No supports, fully articulated, this thing printed great and thanks to the multi-tool heads, there's absolutely no color bleed. One issue I had with the prototype Snapmaker U1 I received last year was the spool holders. They worked well with some filament spools and not others. This bugged me so much that I actually designed and printed these more traditional spool holders to snap in. On the retail unit, they seem to have addressed this, spool snap on and they stay on. I'm not exactly sure what they changed to achieve this, but the tension seems just a touch higher on these new ones. Most filament suppliers have settled on a somewhat standard inner spool

1:50 diameter, which works great with these spool holders, and cardboard spools work even better thanks to these rubber grippers that pop into the lip of the cardboard spool. I did run into an issue with these rolls of GTAC filament, but that should be a pretty infrequent problem if you're buying from a reputable brand. One other thing I noticed here was that the printer.cfg is now locked down. This is where a lot of advanced settings live and for the majority of users, this isn't a problem. But for us weirdos that want absolute full control of our machines, they've added an option to enable both root access and advanced mode within the settings menu of the machine. This is the absolute best way in my opinion to approach

2:36 this problem instead of just locking everybody out. And to be honest, I'm not sure why this approach has bamboozled other companies. Let's jump into another print. This ripper mask from Borderlands 4 was uploaded to printables by the official Borderlands account. The file provided is a pre-painted 3MF file, so regardless of what printer you have, you can just drop it into your slicer and remap the colors to your liking. It has four colors, and I chose to use a matte green PLA from Snapmaker for the accent color, along with white, gray, and black PLA.

3:24 This took a whopping 40 hours to print, but just look at how many color changes are in this. After removing the supports, I just glued in the filters here and attached a headband and we have a fully cosplay worthy mask with absolutely no painting involved. For the entirety of my prints, I purposefully didn't empty this purge catcher in the back here. This is just used for loading the extruder with new filaments, and once at the start of a print for each active extruder. Aside from the purge tower, this is the entirety of purge waste for the hundreds of hours of print time I've put on this machine. Speaking of purge towers, I chose not to change any of the purge tower values. They're set pretty high out

4:10 of the box, but these could be slimmed down dramatically to save even more filament. These are just used to clear out the filament that gets cooked in the extruder while it's parked. There is ooze prevention on this machine, meaning that the parked extruder lowers its temperature to avoid oozing and jams which can occur from plastic sitting in the heated nozzle. This breaks down the polymer chains and hardens the molten plastic, something you definitely want to avoid. If you listen closely, you can hear some popping from the filament that needs to be purged after the tool change. I think this tower could be one third the size and still fully prime the nozzle. Let's run through a couple more prints here. I found a whole selection of

4:57 cool multicolored frogs on STLflix. I grabbed a couple of my favorites and sent them over to the Snapmaker U1. Again, these are pre-colored 3MF files, so Snapmaker Orca opened them with no issues and I just had to assign my colors. Both of these turned out great. Nice, vibrant colors, really nice print quality at the .16 high quality preset, and print time on these were just over eight hours each. Super cool. Sourcing good multicolor files has always been a challenge for me. especially with most designers pushing back against excessive waste from systems like the AMS and opting for multi-color,

5:45 multi-part models. While I had some good luck on STL flicks, there was also a handful recommended to me from the Snapmaker Orca home screen itself. It's pretty rare that models showcased here are of interest, but the Snapmaker team has done a great job of curating some good multi-color models from designers I actually like, including this one. This is the articulated owl from designer FlexiFactory. It prints in multiple parts with multiple colors and after printing, we just need to snap it all together. There's so much articulation here and at 13 hours of print time with a layer height of 0.16 millimeters, the detail is pretty impressive.

6:46 One of my favorite things about this machine is the bulk loading and unloading process. Select which filament you want unloaded and the machine auto grabs and unloads each tool head. Then pull your filament out, take off the spool and load your new filament spools. This little cube on the side here houses some motors that grab your filament and feed it right up to the extruder. Then you can specify your new material and hit load. The U1 takes each hot end and loads the new material. If you're using Snapmaker filament, it auto sets material and color thanks to the RFID tags on

7:35 each spool. Next, I wanted to print a pretty intricate model that required a fair amount of supports. this Charizard Venom mashup. This model required a fair amount of color painting in Snapmaker Orca, but the results are incredible. Default support settings here seem to work great and they were just easy enough to remove.

8:44 Let's look at the tool heads themselves. There's three pogo pins on the tool head and three corresponding pads on the tool head carriage. There's alignment balls, magnets, and a latching mechanism that ensures each tool head pickup is successful. Behind a magnetic cover on the tool heads, we can find the hot end, a stepper motor, and the extruder gears with a screw to adjust idler tension. The hot end is easily switched out after removing two screws and disconnecting the heating and thermistor wires. Part cooling is built into the front of the tool head carriage and gets a little extra help from the auxiliary parts cooling fan built into the

9:29 U1's chamber. Let's run another print. This Dash Hound model from STL Flix took just under nine hours to print at a layer height of 0.16mm. After printing, I just had to snap him together and this little guy's ready to pee on some carpet and bark nonstop at his shadow.

10:17 Snapmaker has released a handful of add-ons for this machine including a cover with air filtration and an air damper to passively keep chamber temperatures at a suitable level for whichever material you're printing in. While I don't have one here today to show you, I plan on doing some testing of this in the future. One final print before I leave you guys today. This is a basketball phone holder. The model is from STLflix and I printed it in orange and black PLA. There's a little bit of a glob here as I didn't use enough infill to support this area fully. But it still turned out great with that signature dimpled texture of an outdoor ball.

11:06 This is just the start of my U1 coverage. There's a lot of other testing I want to do, but I feel pretty confident in saying that this is the printer to beat in 2026. Let me know in the comments what you want to see tested on this machine. And as always, thanks for watching and happy printing.