In November 2023 I sat in a cost review and watched our engineering director explain why the prototyping budget was already 31% over. I’m a procurement manager at a 44-person industrial design and engineering company near Manchester, and I’ve managed that budget (roughly £20,000 a year, excluding tooling) for six years. The overrun wasn’t a mystery: we’d been sending most of our prototypes to a 3D printing service in Manchester, and the invoices were piling up. A basic enclosure at £92 plus VAT, a bracket at £140, a revision of the same bracket at £95. In October alone we spent £2,300. I started searching for other options, but every “3D printing service Manchester” result landed in the same price range. Then our CFO asked the question every procurement person dreads: “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy a machine?”
That question sent me into a research hole for three weeks. It also made me one of those people typing “what are pros and cons of additive manufacturing” at midnight.
The Research Stage: Product Info, Reviews, and the Phantom S6
The first and most important lesson was simple: additive manufacturing has different pros and cons depending on what you make. Yes, it gives you design freedom and eliminates tooling. Yes, it’s fantastic for low-volume parts. But it also means layer lines, surface finish limitations, extra post-processing, and a failure mode that’s sometimes quieter than machining—until the build finishes and looks like a bird’s nest. That balance isn’t the same for every part.
Once I accepted that, I narrowed the equipment search. I looked at several professional FDM machines, and once I dug into the Ultimaker S5 3D printer product info and reviews, the message was consistent: it’s a workhorse, not a racer. Ultimaker publishes its main specs clearly—330 x 240 x 300 mm build volume, dual extrusion with swappable print cores, and full Cura software integration. For us, reliability mattered more than speed because failed prints are invisible budget leaks.
Of course, I also searched “ultimaker s6 3d printer” because no one wants to spend several thousand pounds on a product that gets replaced the next month. I couldn’t find an official S6. The more I dug, the more convinced I became that it was one of those model numbers people search for even though it doesn’t exist. Honest advice: check whether you’re waiting for a real release or just a popular query.
Where the S5 Caught Us Off Guard
We bought the S5 in January 2024. The printer itself was around £5,850; with the Air Manager, spare print cores and a few reels of filament, the total was closer to £7,400. I logged every line item in my cost tracking spreadsheet (yes, I’m that person).
The calibration cube looked great. The first real part did not. I assumed we could take the same files we used to send to the Manchester service bureau and print them in-house. I didn’t verify that assumption until we’d wasted two days and several hundred pounds’ worth of engineering time. It turned out the service bureau had been quietly fixing our design-for-print issues: orientation, supports, wall thickness. That knowledge didn’t appear on their invoices, but we’d been paying for it all along. When that job moved in-house, the responsibility moved with it.
Our failure rate in the first month was around 40%. Most failures were operator error, not machine error. The S5 was consistent; we weren’t. Once our engineer attended Ultimaker’s training and (more importantly) spent time in the slicer, our success rate climbed above 90%. But that curve is a real cost.
There was also a hidden precision problem. Some of our parts needed machined mating faces after printing, because FDM layers are fine for fit checks but not for sealing surfaces. I explored doing light post-processing in-house and got a tempting quote from a carbide ballnose end mill factory in China. The local price for one good tool was around £42; the Chinese factory could send the same tool for £14. When I read the full terms—minimum order of 20 pieces, shipping, import fees, four-week lead time—my savings disappeared. For production runs that might be worth it. For one-off tooling, it wasn’t.
What the Numbers Showed After a Year
Now for the part most reviews skip. By January 2025, we had printed 237 parts on the S5. Total first-year cost was roughly £10,100, including the machine, Air Manager, consumables, print cores, build plate adhesive and a rough electricity estimate. The previous full year of outsourcing comparable parts had cost around £16,400. That’s a saving of about £6,300, before we allocated engineering labour.
If I’m being fully honest, the labour was not free. Slicing, checking the first layer, pulling prints, removing supports—maybe two or three hours per part. If we charged that time to the machine, the advantage shrank to around £3,000. We still considered that a win, because the fast iterations were worth something real to our product team. But it wasn’t the 70% saving the first spreadsheet promised.
We also didn’t stop outsourcing. Around 25% of our prototype parts still go to the 3D printing service in Manchester we used before. Those are the parts we legitimately can’t print as well in-house, or that need to be done while our queue is full. There’s no shame in that.
The Real Pros and Cons of Additive Manufacturing
If someone asks me now, “what are pros and cons of additive manufacturing?”, I don’t give the textbook answer. The pros are iteration speed, geometrical complexity, zero tooling cost, and the ability to hold a real part in your hand an hour after the design meeting. The cons are layer-based tolerances, surface finish, operator dependency, and the quiet cost of failed builds.
The pros win when you need several versions quickly and the part is designed for the process. The cons win when you need tight tolerances, certified materials, or guaranteed repeatability across many units. Most of the hype skips that distinction.
The same boundary logic applies to people. Our old service bureau once told us, “this part is better machined; we don’t do CNC.” It made me trust them more, not less. A supplier who knows their limits is safer than one who promises everything. And when I look at our own operation, I try to apply the same honesty: we bought a printer to add a capability, not to replace every other capability.
Final Thought
If you’re searching for an “Ultimaker S6 3D printer,” stop and ask what you really need. I can’t tell you whether an S6 will ever appear, and honestly, I don’t know why manufacturers skip model numbers. My best guess is that they want a clean break between generations. But I can tell you this: the Ultimaker S5 made our engineering team bolder and our prototype budget smaller. It didn’t replace our service bureau. It didn’t replace CNC. It didn’t print perfectly on the first try.
That’s not the flashiest review. It’s the one I wish I’d read before I made the spreadsheet.
