The 7-Point Ultimaker S5 Checklist I Wish I’d Had Before Buying One

I've been running additive manufacturing for a mid-sized product development firm for five years. In that time, I've personally made — and documented — 11 significant printing mistakes, totaling roughly $14,000 in wasted budget. The most expensive one was a $3,200 print-head repair caused by an extruder clicking sound we ignored for three days. (Ugh.)

Most Ultimaker 3D printer reviews stop at unboxing and benchy pictures. This one is more practical. If you're collecting Ultimaker S5 3D printer product info and reviews, the spec sheet will tell you about the 330 × 240 × 300 mm build volume, dual extrusion, and Cura integration. It won't tell you where the budget goes after the machine is sitting in your office.

Every week, our support inbox gets a mix of questions. “Is the Ultimaker still worth it?” “Can it replace an automatic optical fiber laser welding machine?” (Different tool entirely.) “Should I just use JLCPCB 3D printing service instead of buying a machine?” (Sometimes yes.) And every once in a while, someone lands here after searching “why does my brake pedal shake when i press it.” If that's you, I can't help with your brakes—but the underlying principle in this article is the same: don't ignore mechanical clues until they get expensive.

This checklist is for you if you're an engineer, designer, or production manager about to buy a professional 3D printer and you want to avoid the mistakes that don't show up on the quote.

The 7-Point Checklist I Use Now

1. Decide if you need a printer at all

This is the hardest step and the one most people rush past. We bought our S5 because we were iterating on a physical product almost daily. If that sounds like your workflow, owning a machine can pay off. But if you need only a handful of parts, JLCPCB 3D printing service is often cheaper: no print cores, no build plates, no maintenance, no learning curve. (I really should follow this advice more often when we're near capacity.)

One procurement manager asked whether the machine could replace an automatic optical fiber laser welding machine they'd seen at a trade show. Different process, different material, different job. An FDM printer makes polymer parts; a laser welder joins metal. The S5 is good at what it does—but “what it does” is not “everything.”

Granted, this requires an honest forecast of how many hours you'll actually print each month. The machine is a tool, not a trophy.

2. Budget for the whole system, not just the machine

The base price is only the start. When we configured our S5 for production, we added spare print cores, a box of build plates, an air management unit, and a service plan. By the time it arrived, the real cost was 25–35% above the base price. I'm not complaining about the machine—I'm warning you about the budget.

As of our last purchase in 2024, Ultimaker's own product page is the best place to verify current pricing and included items. Blog posts like this one get outdated faster than you'd think.

3. Check your room before the machine arrives

You don't need a cleanroom, but you do need a stable environment. Our first S5 sat near an AC vent, and we spent a week chasing first-layer warping that disappeared as soon as we moved it 10 feet. Drafts, temperature swings, and airborne dust are the quiet enemies of professional FDM printing.

If you plan to print materials that produce fumes—ABS, nylon, polycarbonate—think about ventilation before the machine is installed. The S5 is more forgiving than an open-frame hobby printer, but “more forgiving” isn't “immune.”

4. Build a print-core tracking habit (the step everyone skips)

Print cores are wear parts, and they degrade slowly. A worn 0.4 mm core doesn't fail dramatically; it just starts underextruding in ways that are hard to see until a 14-hour print fails on the last 20 layers.

That happened to us in 2023. The printed part looked fine on the screen, but the physical part had gaps. We replaced the core and the problem disappeared. Now we log hours after every print. Digital Factory gives us machine data, but a simple notebook is what caught the trend. (Mental note: order spare cores before the current one dies, not after.)

Five minutes of logging per print has saved us more than any other process change.

5. Measure something on day one

When a printer says “calibration complete,” it doesn't mean you're done checking. After one software update, our S5 reported everything was fine, but a calibration cube came out 0.3 mm off in Y. The machine was happy; the part wasn't.

Print a simple test artifact, wait for it to cool, measure it with calipers, and record the numbers. If dimensions are off, check belt tension, build plate flex, or the print core before you start a critical production job. Five minutes of verification beats five days of correction.

Five minutes of verification beats five days of correction.

6. Train a second operator before the machine is unboxed

If only one person knows the Cura profiles, material settings, and how to clear a jam, that person becomes a bottleneck. I learned this when our lead operator went on vacation and an urgent job sat for three days. Documentation is not just for compliance; it's for keeping production alive.

To be fair, this problem isn't unique to Ultimaker. Any professional printer makes it easy to depend on one person. But because the S5 is reliable, it's tempting to forget how much knowledge the machine is silently carrying.

7. Make a “weird noise” decision tree

The $3,200 mistake I mentioned at the start started with a clicking extruder. We heard it, assumed it was normal, and kept printing. Three days later, the print head needed a repair that cost more than the original service plan. It wasn't a random failure; it was a clue we ignored.

If you've ever Googled “why does my brake pedal shake when i press it,” you understand the concept: vibration is a symptom, not a personality flaw. The same logic applies to a 3D printer. A clicking extruder, a new layer-line pattern, a print that keeps lifting in the same corner—those are clues. Set simple rules before you need them:

First-layer anomaly: stop and check the build plate. Layer shift: check belts before blaming the model. Clicking from the extruder: inspect the print core before assuming it's a software issue. You don't need a 100% success rate; you need to catch failures before they become expensive.

The Cost of Not Using a Checklist

Those 11 mistakes cost roughly $14,000. Most of them were preventable. I can only speak to our experience with the Ultimaker S5 from 2022 onward; software and materials evolve, and your mileage may vary if you're running a different workflow or a different scale of production. But the pattern holds: 5 minutes of checking will beat 5 days of rework, more often than not.

If you're still deciding between a machine and a service, use a printing service for one-offs and buy the printer when the volume justifies it. And if you came here from the brake pedal search: check your rotors, and don't wait until the whole car shakes. (This article won't fix your brakes, but at least you now know the checklist mindset.)