Prusa's Gen 2 Refresh: Nozzle Wipers, GT1.5 Belts, and 60°C Chamber Heat
3D PrintingPrusa Research doesn’t usually do quiet mid-cycle refreshes, but the second-generation updates to the CORE One+, CORE One L+, and XL+ are substantive enough to matter — and they arrive at the same price as the machines they replace.
What Happened
All three machines receive four shared upgrades. First: a nozzle wiper, a dedicated cleaning mechanism that eliminates the need for wipe towers during multi-material prints. Wipe towers burn filament and add print time; removing them is a meaningful workflow improvement for anyone running multi-material jobs regularly.
Second: GT1.5 belts replace the previous belt specification. The stated benefit is reduced moiré patterns and resonance artifacts — issues that have surfaced in fast-print benchmarks and are particularly visible in large flat surfaces.
Third: a Tool Offset Sensor that calibrates toolhead alignment reported to be 20 times faster than the previous method. Toolhead calibration in multi-nozzle systems has historically been a tedious manual step; 20x speed improvement means this goes from a time cost to a non-event.
Fourth: modified top panel access for easier maintenance — a quality-of-life change that matters more over months of ownership than it does on first boot.
Why It Matters
The XL+ gets the most significant exclusive upgrade: a 360-degree nozzle cooling system and a chamber heater capable of reaching 60°C. That chamber temperature unlocks reliable printing in ABS, PC Blend, and PC-CF — engineering materials that have historically required purpose-built enclosures or workarounds on prosumer machines. For Prusa’s industrial and maker-professional audience, this closes a material gap that has pushed buyers toward dedicated enclosed systems.
The CORE One+ (Gen 2) and CORE One L+ gain optimized heating routines and faster first-layer preparation via improved heatbed mounting — incremental but real improvements for high-throughput print farms.
The timing is notable: Prusa is also teasing the INDX automatic toolchanger for the CORE One+ (September), PrusaSlicer 3.0, and the HT Hotend. The Gen 2 refresh positions the hardware platform for those software and accessory launches.
What This Means for Buyers
Upgrade kits are available immediately through Prusa’s online store through September 2026. All new orders automatically ship with the upgraded components. The pricing hold is significant — Prusa resisted the temptation to charge a premium for the refresh.
For existing CORE One+ and XL owners, the kit upgrade path makes the nozzle wiper and belt changes accessible without a full machine replacement. Whether the belt upgrade justifies the kit purchase depends on how much your current output shows resonance artifacts; for the XL+, the chamber heater upgrade is harder to pass up if engineering plastics are part of your workflow.
The So What
Prusa’s Gen 2 refresh is the kind of upgrade that doesn’t make headlines but meaningfully improves day-to-day operation. The nozzle wiper alone changes multi-material printing from a filament-wasting workflow into a clean one. The 60°C chamber heater on the XL+ is the more ambitious addition — it expands the material envelope in a way that opens up genuinely new use cases without requiring a new machine. With the INDX toolchanger and PrusaSlicer 3.0 arriving this fall, the CORE platform is entering its most capable phase yet.
Source: 3DPrint.com
Content created with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.
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