Eight separate toolheads sit parked inside the AXILOOP MC8, each one kept heated and ready to work. A color change never sends good filament into a purge tower, because the next head is already at temperature. The build volume runs 300 × 300 × 300 mm, and the Kickstarter campaign opens Thursday, November 12.
Most multicolor printers run a single nozzle and flush good filament mid-print at every color swap, wasting time and material on each changeover.
Price: $999 (VIP reservation)
Regular Price: $1,499
Where to buy: AXILOOP
Eight heads, four-second swaps
AXILOOP calls the switching near-zero-waste, with no-wipe alignment keeping all eight heads registered to each other. Every head stays preheated inside the machine, so there’s no warm-up wait when a new color or material rotates into the print. The swap itself takes just four seconds, and with eight heads loaded, a single part can carry eight colors, or eight different materials, without one full purge cycle between them.
Speed claims need care, because that number isn’t the printing number. Deposition tops out at 300 mm/s, while travel moves reach 600 mm/s, with acceleration up to 25,000 mm/s² on the maker’s spec sheet.
Hardened-steel nozzles are rated to 320°C, and each flows up to 34 mm³/s at the standard 0.4 mm fitting.
A bed that maps itself in a minute
Before a print starts, an eddy-current scan reads 2,500 points across the plate in about a minute, building the leveling map the first layer depends on. The bed reaches 110°C and carries a PEI-coated flexible steel plate, so finished parts pop off with a flex instead of a pry bar. Tool offsets are compensated to 0.03 mm, which is how all eight separate heads land filament in exactly the same place layer after layer.
Forty-five sensors watch the machine while it works, covering toolhead changes, filament feeding, print progress, temperature, and safety. A 1080p camera feeds the AI monitoring, and the maker’s own first-layer test film shows the checks running during a real first layer.
Filament loads with one tap from the 4-inch touchscreen. Wi-Fi and USB, 16 GB of storage, app control, and a status light round it out.
The Pro adds a heated chamber
Both editions share one platform: the same eight heads, the same build volume, the same motion system. The Pro separates itself with a glass door and air circulation. Active chamber heating to 65°C is the bigger addition, since engineering filaments warp when the air around a tall print cools unevenly. It draws more power doing it: 2,200 W against the standard machine’s 1,200 W, a gap worth knowing before the printer claims a circuit in a workshop.
Toolchangers are having a busy season, and head-swapping keeps gaining ground on single-nozzle machines. We covered Bambu Lab’s new H3C earlier this month, a desktop toolchanger built around the same swap-instead-of-purge idea, and the MC8 pushes that same idea to a full eight heads sharing one gantry.
Reservations first, Kickstarter Thursday
The campaign itself isn’t live yet. AXILOOP’s project page is a pre-launch page, and the maker dates the opening to Thursday, November 12 at 11 PM in China, which is 9 AM Central the same morning. Until then, the only money moving is a refundable reservation deposit on the maker’s own site.
A $20 deposit holds VIP pricing: $999 for the MC8, $1,399 for the Pro. That’s $100 under Super Early Bird, with $100 cashback on the Kickstarter order, both returned within 14 days of the campaign ending.
From the maker, launch pricing starts at $1,099 without a deposit, against the standard machine’s $1,499 MSRP.
Who’s behind it
AXILOOP is the dedicated 3D printing division of Xike Industrial, a subsidiary of Shenzhen-listed Zesum Technology, stock code 301486. The MC8 made its public debut at Formnext Asia Shenzhen in late August, in front of a trade crowd. The parent group builds high-precision grinding equipment for BYD, Corning, and Lens Technology, so the manufacturing depth behind this first printer is industrial, even if the brand is new to US buyers.
What to watch Thursday
No shipping schedule has been published yet, and that’s the first gap Thursday needs to close. The full campaign price ladder is the second gap, since the tiers between VIP and standard haven’t been priced in public yet. Third is footage: a four-second swap on a spec sheet isn’t the same claim as one in hour six of a real long print.
Price: $999 (VIP reservation)
Regular Price: $1,499
Where to buy: AXILOOP
The refundable deposit keeps Thursday’s decision cheap either way. Reserve if eight heads solve your purge problem; otherwise wait for the campaign page, and we’ll update this piece when it opens.
