Bondtech’s INDX toolchanger already had one black eye this summer: the “hardened” nozzles it ships with aren’t actually hardened. Now a familiar name in hotends is stepping in to help fix it. On August 28, E3D confirmed on Instagram that it’s developing an abrasive-resistant nozzle variant for INDX, working directly with Bondtech.
What Bondtech actually admitted
We covered the nozzle wear caveat when Prusa started selling INDX pre-installed in complete printers, but Bondtech’s own admission is worth reading in full. In a July 29 blog post, the company said the nozzles shipping with both the Founders Edition and the CORE One+ conversion kits were listed as hardened and abrasive-resistant, and they aren’t. Bulk testing puts them at roughly 30 to 32 HRC. For comparison, Bondtech’s own numbers put brass nozzles at 0 to 10 HRC, plain steel at 20 to 25, and a truly hardened nozzle at 55 to 60. Boxes shipped for a while still carried the “hardened” label.
To Bondtech’s credit, the post doesn’t try to spin it. Founder Gustav Bondéus called it a mistake and apologized for not communicating it clearly earlier. Regular filament, PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU, nylon and the rest, isn’t affected by this at all. Glass fiber, carbon fiber, glow-in-the-dark and metal-filled filaments are the problem: they wear the nozzle down faster than the original listing promised. At the time of that post, Bondtech had no fix, no compensation plan, and no timeline, only a promise to keep customers updated either way.
Where E3D fits in
A month later, E3D showed up in the story. In an Instagram post reported by Fabbaloo, the company said its team is working on an abrasive-resistant nozzle for the INDX system, with no release date confirmed yet, just a promise of updates as things move along.
E3D isn’t a random name to attach to this problem. It makes the V6 and Revo hotends that a huge share of the desktop printing world has copied in some form, and its ObXidian nozzle line already handles abrasive filament using a chromium nitride coating over a non-stick layer. If anyone outside Bondtech can ship a nozzle that’s hardened for real, E3D is a reasonable bet. Whether that means a redesigned nozzle body or an E3D coating applied to the existing INDX geometry, neither company has said yet.
What this changes if you already own an INDX
Nothing changes today. If you’re printing PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU or nylon through INDX, the nozzles you have keep doing that job exactly as before. The gap is specifically abrasive material: Prusa’s own wear testing, published alongside the CORE One L+ INDX launch, put the limit at roughly 10kg of PETG-CF, 5kg of PC-CF, or half a kilogram of abrasive Ultraglow filament per nozzle before print quality drops off. If the reason you bought an 8-tool INDX was to run carbon fiber through most of those tools, that’s the part worth budgeting around until E3D actually ships something.
There’s still no date attached to any of this. Development, testing and a production run take time even for a company that already knows how to harden a nozzle properly, and E3D hasn’t promised a specific one. We’ll update this once a real spec or ship date exists.