Bondtech Nozzle Gate

Bondtech Discord, 17 July 2026: Gustav Bondéus, listed by Bondtech as Head of Manufacturing, answers "No" when asked whether nozzles sold as hardened could be exchanged for free, then defends the label as technically correct

Buyers of Bondtech's INDX tool-changer paid for nozzles advertised as hardened and abrasive-resistant but received nitrocarburized steel measured at 30 to 32 HRC. This is about half the hardness implied by the label, as true hardened printing nozzles measure about 55 to 60 HRC. The affected nozzles shipped with the INDX Founders Edition and the initial batches of the Prusa CORE One+ INDX upgrade kit. On July 17, 2026, Bondtech's Head of Manufacturing, Gustav Bondéus, defended the hardened label and refused a free exchange when the issue was first raised in the company's Discord. Bondtech acknowledged the mismatch to that community on July 23, 2026, and admitted the labeling error publicly on July 29, 2026. Prusa Research halted INDX kit shipments until mid-August 2026. On August 19, 2026 Bondtech emailed Founders Edition owners with comparative wear test results and offered them either a payment for each affected nozzle or a full refund of the system. The same day, Prusa Research told INDX Conversion Kit customers that it would restart shipping later that week, that it would administer Bondtech's compensation itself as Prusa store credit or a cash refund, and that it would add a free CORE One+ (Gen 2) hardware upgrade to initial-batch kits at its own expense.

Nozzles sold as hardened shipped at 30 to 32 HRC

The discrepancy surfaced on July 17, 2026 through two channels at once, neither of them a company announcement. In Bondtech's Discord that evening, a customer asked for an official answer on whether the nozzles were hardened. The reply gave the shipped hardness as 30 to 32 HRC against 55 to 60 for a hardened nozzle, said proper hardened nozzles would be available at a later date, answered "No" when asked whether owners could exchange the advertised tools for free, and maintained that the existing label was technically correct. The same afternoon, a buyer who had noticed the word "hardened" disappear from the product page opened a support ticket and received a reply signed by founder Martin Bondéus. According to Tom's Hardware, that email was subsequently posted online. Bondéus wrote that "during production, we encountered manufacturing challenges that prevented us from machining that material reliably" and that "the cutting tools simply did not withstand the process," so the company chose to supply the nitrocarburized version for the time being.

All3DP reported that Bondtech made a wave of quiet product page edits amid Bondtech & Prusa community discontent before it publicly admitted the problem. On July 29, 2026 Bondtech published a formal update, signed by Gustav Bondéus, whom the company's team page lists as Head of Manufacturing, that set the record straight:

"The INDX nozzles (both Founders Edition and the CORE One+ Conversion kits from Prusa) were sold as hardened and abrasive-resistant. They are not, in the way that the description leads you to expect, and we need to set the record straight."

The same statement gave the hardness figures behind the dispute. Bondtech measured the shipped nozzles at "roughly 30-32 HRC in bulk testing" and set them against a scale of common nozzle materials, placing the units it sold as hardened well below the range a true hardened nozzle occupies.

Rockwell C hardness (HRC) by nozzle type, per Bondtech's July 29, 2026 statement

Nozzle type	Approximate hardness (HRC)
Brass	0 to 10
Plain steel	20 to 25
Shipped INDX nozzle (nitrocarburized)	30 to 32
True hardened	55 to 60

All3DP put the shipped figure at about 30 HRC against the 60 typical for abrasive-resistant printing, describing the nozzles as not up to the zero fear of wear the marketing had promised.

All3DP reported the shipped nozzles measured about 30 HRC on the Rockwell scale against the 60 typical for heavy-duty abrasive-resistant printing.

The "hardened" wording was removed before customers were told

The July 17 support email records that the change was deliberate and predates any notice to buyers. Bondtech wrote that a fully hardened version at roughly 60 HRC had been evaluated and dropped because the material could not be machined reliably, that the nitrocarburized version was supplied for the time being, that the shipped nozzles were not intended for prolonged use with highly abrasive filaments, and that the word "hardened" had been removed from the product page deliberately to avoid creating incorrect expectations. An Internet Archive capture of the INDX Development Kit page taken on July 16, 2026, the day before, still described every passive tool as crafted from hardened steel and suitable for carbon-fiber, glass-fiber and glow-in-the-dark filament with "zero fear of wear". All3DP reported a wave of quiet product page edits during this period. Boxes, invoices and packing slips continued to carry the hardened description, and Bondtech did not notify existing buyers until the July 23 Discord statement. The current listing describes the tools as "Steel CHT".

The INDX tool-changer

The INDX is Bondtech's automatic tool-changing system for desktop 3D printers, marketed for near waste-free filament swaps. It swaps filaments quickly because the incoming nozzle is rapidly heated by induction, & Fabbaloo notes that induction heating requires a metal that reacts to the induction field, which brass does not. The nozzle is therefore the induction-heated element itself & has no off-the-shelf replacement, so owners depend on Bondtech for replacement parts rather than dropping in a standard nozzle. The system shipped in Bondtech's own Founders Edition & as the basis for Prusa's CORE One+ INDX conversion kit, a collaboration between Prusa Research & Bondtech whose first Founders Edition wave was a limited run for early adopters. Installing the Prusa kit requires stripping down a CORE One, removing its Nextruder & fitting the INDX carriage with a rack that holds eight toolheads.

Nitrocarburizing versus hardened steel

The nozzles that shipped are not traditional hardened steel. Fabbaloo describes nitrocarburizing as a surface-treatment process that diffuses nitrogen and carbon into the outside layer, leaving a softer nozzle that has a hardened coating rather than a part hardened all the way through. That construction changes how the nozzle wears: the hard case protects the surface until abrasive particles cut through it, after which the softer core underneath degrades. Bondtech told customers the current nozzles are suitable for the large majority of non-abrasive materials, including PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU, PC & Nylon, & will perform as expected. Abrasive filaments such as glass-fiber, carbon-fiber, glow-in-the-dark & metal-filled materials will cause accelerated nozzle wear. Fabbaloo notes that this cut against the community's working assumption that a single hardened nozzle handles every abrasive filament, because Bondtech said the material should manage typical carbon-fiber or glass-fiber filaments but not the more abrasive glow-in-the-dark type.

Fabbaloo described the shipped nozzles as ordinary steel treated by nitrocarburizing, a surface-treatment process that diffuses nitrogen and carbon into the outside layer, leaving a softer nozzle that has a hardened coating.

Timeline

Bondtech's pre-order material listed the INDX specification as "Hardened with CHT" on November 29, 2025. Founders Edition orders completed on March 20, 2026, with buyer-posted order summaries showing INDX "Hardened Tool" line items as paid products. The Development Kit page still promised hardened steel and abrasive resistance when it was archived on July 16, 2026. The hardness gap was stated and the label defended on July 17, both in Discord and in a support email. Screenshots, delivery photos, invoices and archived sales language circulated among owners over the following days, and independent coverage began. On July 23, Bondtech posted a statement to its Discord accepting the mismatch. The formal update followed on July 29. On August 19, Bondtech emailed Founders Edition owners with wear test results and a compensation offer, and Prusa Research emailed its own INDX Conversion Kit customers its wear test results, a compensation choice, a free CORE One+ (Gen 2) upgrade and notice that shipping would restart later that week, having passed the mid-August restart it had indicated in July.

Bondtech's response

Bondtech first accepted the mismatch publicly on July 23, 2026, in a message posted to its Discord server by Gustav Bondéus:

"About our INDX nozzles sold as 'hardened'. TLDR: They do not meet up to the industry standard as 'hardened'. We know you're angry, and you should be. We sold a nozzle that was not what we promised, and we take complete ownership of this mistake."

The same message said a full solution was being worked on, that much of the team was on summer leave and the complete plan would take longer than the company would like, and that everyone affected would be made right.

Bondtech's July 29, 2026 statement acknowledged the error & apologized for failing to communicate the error. It confirmed the scope covers every nozzle that shipped with the INDX Founders Edition & every nozzle in the initial batches of the Prusa CORE One+ INDX upgrade kit, & warned that boxes in transit might still carry the incorrect hardened label, which the company said it would correct on future boxes. Bondtech committed to publish a wear profile in the following weeks, including a hardness profile at depth & how many kilograms of abrasive filament a nozzle survives by a defined metric.

Bondtech's July 29, 2026 statement told INDX buyers the nozzles were sold as hardened and abrasive-resistant and that They are not, in the way that the description leads you to expect.

On compensation the statement offered no concrete plan. Bondtech said it would not promise dates or pricing it could not back up & that a fully hardened INDX nozzle was still a long way from serial production, with development, testing & validation likely to take many months. The company said that offering a percentage discount on hardened nozzles before knowing their production cost could be misleading, since such nozzles would likely cost more than standard ones. A refund & return was available, but Bondtech said it would rather prepare an upgrade path so affected owners could keep using the INDX in the meantime.

Wear test results and the August 19 compensation offer

Bondtech's August 19, 2026 newsletter to Founders Edition owners gave wear test results and offered $20 or €17.50 in store credit, or $15 or €13 in cash, for each affected nozzle, or a full refund on return.

On August 19, 2026 Bondtech emailed Founders Edition owners with the results of its wear testing and a compensation offer. The message repeated that the supplied nozzles are surface-hardened rather than fully hardened and apologized again for the specification.

Bondtech said that with standard carbon-fiber materials such as PETG-CF and PA11-CF it had not been able to wear the nozzles to the point where print quality was affected, and that its test units had printed 10 kg of PC-CF with no visible wear. It described Prusa's results from a larger print farm as consistent with its own, with test nozzles printing around 10 kg of PETG-CF, around 5 kg of PC-CF and around 2 to 3 kg of PA-CF each, and showing minor wear at the orifice without any corresponding change in extrusion width, print accuracy or visible print quality. The nozzles were said to be unsuitable for PETG Ultraglow, which Prusa uses as an accelerated wear test, and owners printing almost only abrasive materials continuously were told the current nozzles are not the right solution for them. Bondtech said it was investigating a more wear-resistant nozzle for those cases and gave no date.

Owners keeping their INDX were offered $20 or €17.50 in Bondtech store credit for each affected nozzle, or $15 or €13 as a cash refund. Bondtech gave the totals as $160 or €140 in credit against $120 or €104 in cash for an eight-tool kit, and $80 or €70 in credit against $60 or €52 in cash for a four-tool kit, and said the amounts were based on the average percentage price difference between standard and fully hardened nozzles on the market. The alternative offered was to return the Founders Edition for a full refund at no cost to the owner. Claims were to be made by support ticket giving an order number and a choice of store credit, cash refund or return. Bondtech's own listing priced a replacement Steel CHT passive tool at $45.00.

Bondtech wrote that claiming either option counts as accepting it as the resolution of the matter, and that the rest of the warranty is unaffected. It asked for a preferred option by mid-September and said that without a reply it would treat the matter as inactive and close it for administrative purposes, adding that this would not affect any rights owners hold under consumer protection law and that they remain able to make contact within the time limits those laws provide.

Prusa Research's response

Prusa Research, whose CORE One+ INDX upgrade relied on Bondtech's hardware & whose own product pages had advertised hardened nozzles, paused the rollout. Tom's Hardware reported that Prusa delayed shipping INDX conversion kits until mid-August 2026 & emailed the delay to everyone with an active order, telling them a statement it issued read:

Bondtech has recently confirmed that the nozzles currently supplied with the INDX system are surface-hardened rather than fully hardened as originally planned, and has not yet finalized the compensation plan for affected customers. We believe it is better to wait until both we and you have clearer information, rather than ship the kits while this important question remains unresolved.

Prusa gave customers the option to cancel delayed orders at no cost & said it would add free extra hardware to the kits once they shipped, without specifying what that would be. Prusa engineers tested the nozzles & found little wear after five kilograms of carbon-fiber PETG, but the protective coating began to fail after 100 grams of the abrasive Ultraglow filament.

The August 19 update and the restart of shipping

On August 19, 2026 Prusa Research emailed INDX Conversion Kit customers a further update, which it also posted to r/prusa3d for transparency. It said it now had enough information to move forward and would start shipping later that week.

Prusa reported that with standard carbon-fiber materials such as PETG-CF, PC-CF, and PA-CF it had so far struggled to wear the nozzles to the point where any deterioration in print quality could be identified. Each of its PETG-CF nozzles had printed 10 kg of material; its PC-CF nozzles tracked 5 kg and its PA-CF nozzles about 2 to 3 kg each, with some minimal wear measurable at the nozzle orifice but no corresponding change in extrusion width, print accuracy or visible print quality. The company said the nozzles do wear, as all nozzles eventually do, but that their real-world abrasion resistance is significantly better than Bondtech's initial concerns had suggested. PETG Ultraglow remained its accelerated wear test, on the basis that it is known to wear out most nozzles on the market at a fast rate; Prusa said it was still accumulating data and would likely publish a larger blog post covering its findings. It added that the nozzles are not the ideal solution for a machine dedicated to printing abrasive materials, and that Bondtech's more wear-resistant nozzle had no confirmed availability date, price or guarantee that such a product would become available, so it did not want to keep orders waiting for it.

Because the kits were bought from Prusa, Prusa said it would handle Bondtech's compensation directly for its customers. Owners of an eight-tool kit were offered $160 or €140 in Prusa store credit or a $120 or €104 cash refund, and owners of a four-tool kit $80 or €70 in credit or a $60 or €52 cash refund. The totals match those Bondtech offered its own Founders Edition owners, but are redeemable in Prusa's store rather than Bondtech's. Vouchers were to be emailed in waves synchronized with the shipping of individual INDX batches, with support to be contacted if none arrived within two or three days of delivery, and the cash refund to be requested through support instead. A member of the Prusa team said in the thread that the vouchers were set to be valid for one year, until September 2027.

Prusa also identified the free extra hardware it had promised in July without specifying: the newly announced CORE One+ (Gen 2) upgrade, consisting of new belts, belt pulleys and thermal expansion joints, included at Prusa's own expense for initial-batch INDX conversion kit orders so that owners could bring the printer up to the current revision while fitting the INDX parts. Kits were to ship in the existing queue by order date as tool shipments arrived from Bondtech, with the option to cancel before shipment for a full refund at no cost to the customer, and Prusa's extended 60-day return policy after delivery.

The offer did not extend to Bondtech's Founders Edition buyers, who bought from Bondtech and were covered by Bondtech's separate offer of the same day. A Prusa staff account said in the thread that the company had tried and failed to reach an agreement that would have extended the Gen 2 upgrade to Founders Edition owners.

Card payment surcharges

Separately from the nozzle dispute, Bondtech's checkout has displayed a card processing fee as a distinct line item labelled "Fee for Credit Card (Stripe)". Submitted captures record the fee at 28.01 kr on a Swedish checkout, €4.45 on a euro basket and $15.02 on a US order summary, and buyers have privately confirmed that it remained on completed Visa, Mastercard and American Express orders. The same amount has also appeared labelled as a PayPal fee.

Article 62(4) of Directive (EU) 2015/2366 provides that a payee shall not request charges for the use of payment instruments covered by the Interchange Fee Regulation, which includes consumer cards. Chapter 5, section 1 of the Swedish Payment Services Act (2010:751) states that a payee may not charge the payer a fee for the use of a payment instrument, and Konsumentverket states that card fees are prohibited both online and in store. No regulator has ruled on Bondtech's practice.

Warranty terms

Bondtech's published terms state that products supplied by Bondtech have a 90-day warranty, without distinguishing that voluntary commercial guarantee from the statutory rights a consumer holds against the seller. Article 17 of Directive (EU) 2019/771 requires a commercial guarantee statement to say plainly that the consumer retains free statutory remedies and that the guarantee does not affect them. Under the Swedish Consumer Sales Act, in force since May 1, 2022, the seller answers for defects present at delivery for three years. The concern raised is not the ninety-day duration but the absence of any statement of statutory rights alongside it, which could lead a buyer to read ninety days as the whole window for raising a fault. No regulatory decision or judgment on this clause has been located.

Consumer response

Trade coverage recorded sharp community anger alongside a mitigating technical point. Tom's Hardware wrote that the news hit Founders Edition buyers hard & located the core grievance in the marketing rather than the metal:

The real problem is not that they went with a lesser nozzle, but that they kept the "hardened steel" wording in promotional materials. If Bondtech said from the beginning (or before customers locked in their pre-orders) that the INDX shipped with ordinary steel nozzles, no one would have blinked.

One Founders Edition buyer, posting under the handle Daddie0, built a protest website, Nozzlegate.com, in response. Tom's Hardware reported that he disputed Bondtech's 90-day warranty policy, arguing it misled consumers by omitting Sweden's mandatory multi-year consumer protections, & that his standard two-week return window had closed the day after the story broke. At the same time, both Tom's Hardware & Fabbaloo noted the practical scope of the defect: buyers who print only non-abrasive materials are unaffected, & Fabbaloo framed the episode as an expectation gap in which buyers were led to expect real hardened-nozzle capability the system did not deliver.

On July 29, a Discord participant posted screenshots of messages criticizing Bondtech's response and asking for an exchange, and later said they had been banned. An account linked to Prusa replied that bans were likely limited to spam or rule violations and offered to help, without confirming the reason in this case. The screenshots do not show who acted or why.

In the r/prusa3d thread carrying Prusa's August 19 update, reaction divided between owners who welcomed the compensation and the free Gen 2 upgrade and owners who said the store credit fell short of what they had paid for. Commenters objected that the voucher carries an expiry date, that only one voucher can be applied per order and that vouchers do not cover shipping, and that the credit cannot be redeemed at Prusa's US storefront, where the shipping cost from Czechia would otherwise be the larger expense on a small item. Others calculated that the amount would not cover replacing four or eight nozzles at the $45 list price of a Steel CHT tool, let alone a hardened version expected to cost more, and asked instead for a commitment that existing buyers could obtain hardened nozzles once they exist. Founders Edition owners posting in the same thread said they received nothing equivalent.

Unresolved

As of 20 August 2026, Bondtech had published kilogram figures for nozzle wear from its own testing and from Prusa's, but not the hardness profile at depth it promised on July 29, and not a defined survival metric. It had given no date for the more wear-resistant nozzle it said it was investigating, and Prusa said that product had no confirmed availability date, price or guarantee that it would become available. Prusa's fuller account of its own wear testing, which it said it would likely publish as a blog post, had not appeared, and Prusa had not yet published a shipping schedule for the conversion kits.