Thanks Llama! Yeah there is definitely less going on. I do also feel like I run into less issues with a direct drive. I like both but if I had to choose definitely on the direct drive train.
I just like to add that when I bought a pre-built direct drive extruder for one of my Ender 3 printers I used it for a while and the print quality was just not very good so I took it apart and I found that the two screws that hold the hot end to the back plate were loose. Both of them were loose. I have found that poor print quality sometimes is caused if the hot end is not at right angles to the bed. Because of that, one of the first things I do while I'm putting a new printer together, is to make sure everything is perfectly square including the hot end in relation to the bed. Everything on the printer must be absolutely square and at perfect right angles all around, and of course, all of the wheels tight enough against the extrusions that there is no wobble. Because the nozzle is so tiny, it's not a huge deal when they're a little bit out of square, but it does affect print quality and even more if you use ironing.
Thanks for posting. I'm a 54 y.o. noob at 3D printing (got my Ender 3 V2 three weeks ago) but have jumped in with both feet. I'm interested in print quality and reliability above speed, and therefore have made the decision to go with a direct drive (will order the Orbiter this weekend). With the issues I've had with the stock extruder, the time I save by not having to fiddle with it can be put toward actually printing, which increases my productivity. Add to this the greater versatility of DD systems, and for me it's a no-brainer.
I just recently switched to DD on my (heavily modified, at least for my standards) Ender 3 after hearing a very compelling argument: It's a bedslinger, so the X axis, even with the weight of the motor, is still less than that on the Y axis. I have an ADXL345 accelerometer for resonance compensation so I thought hey, I can check that⁽¹⁾. Sure enough, I _could_ go up to a max of ~16k acceleration on the X axis, but only 4700 on the Y axis. Since both axis are linked in most slicers, the Y axis will _always_ ⁽²⁾ be the limiting factor for a bedslinger. So, at least for that type of printer, the weight of the hotend carriage is, functionally, a non-issue (ignoring wear and tear for a second). The advantages of a) being able to print TPEs and b) less clogging on an all-metal hotend due to less retraction are just much more beneficial, at least for my use case. Not saying it's "the perfect upgrade that everybody should use™", but don't get dissuaded just because somebody tells you it'll make the carriage too heavy. ⁽¹⁾: I just did another test run with my DD setup: Klipper suggests max_accel
Team: have an all around printer that works perfectly for 90% of your needs, then other printer(s) you change to be specialty printers for the remaining 10%.
I have 15 machines on my print farm and over the years, I have upgraded as many as I can to direct drive. It's just so reliable for all my material types and I don't have those dreaded Bowden Tube popping out from the hot end or extruder issues some stock printers are notorious for.
@@ModBotArmy I have 3 CR-10S machines upgraded to the Bondtech Direct Drive System. It’s super easy to install. They offer the firmware for it and even a version if you opt to install a BL Touch (mine do). It’s a “what’s your time worth “ kind of upgrade. Very quick to do. I like that direct drive setup so much I’ve had them make me a few (minus the Creality wiring) to install onto other machines that have the same CR-10 style carriage. Check my channel for my DDS install video 🙂
I just upgraded to direct drive on my ender 3 a few days ago, so far I love it. It's so much more reliable, I haven't had a single clog so far. The only downside is that they are more prone to ringing, but it's worth it
New to the topic, first printer ordered yesterday. In my budget I had to choose between direct drive or dual z-steppers. Chose the later. It's nice to hear that upgrades at a later point are feasable without need for a whole new printer.
Ender 3 pro. Added linear rails to (y) axis and (x) plus 2 z motors and the direct drive . The linear rail on (x) helps with the added weight. Love it.
im fairly new to 3d printing. i bought an ender 3 v2 and a short time after testing it i bought a direct drive extruder to install while installed an all metal hotend and it made life much easier and the prints much better.
The quality i'm getting printing PETG with a direct drive compared to a Bowden setup makes it worth all the way for me. i go through allooot of PETG and the Print finish/quality is just perfect with it i pretty much have Zero stringing and all i need to do is remove some support and the parts are done nothing to clean up. when i was running bowden i always had some stringing and needed to cleanup the parts a bit.
I feel like with PET-G on most bowden setups I get some stringing and occasional blobs. I also feel like dd seems to remove most of this for me. I have done quite a bit of PETG on bowden but I definitely have experienced what you are mentioning.
I recently purchased a Biqi B1 and prefer it immensely over my old Deltaprintr. I did swap the extruder over to the EZR and cut the bowden tube as short as possible. It's running like a champ and I was able to print with TPU without recalibrating.
That is awesome! I love my B1 so much. I only have space to run a couple of printers right now in this place but I really want to do more printing on that machine.
For me allways direct drive. You can use light extruder because the resistance on the filament is less, usually higher flow and easy to print more filaments. For a Prusa style printer it goes all the way, because the bed is heavy and the X axis doesn't matter if you add a bit more weight For a CoreXY maybe bowden is a better choice because of the rapid movement you could have. But with sturdy frame and big motors you can have a Direct drive and still print at 100mm/s at 3000-5000mm/s2 acc
I ran a Zesty Nimble V1.2 on my delta for about two years. I'd be happy to answer questions about remote drive stuff out of my experience. My thoughts: It's a great system for taking weight off the effector without losing the short filament path that flexibles prefer. It did take a fair bit of tuning to get working well, but their documentation and support is good. Unfortunately mine was an older production model and had "Ripple" issues (slight periodic over/underextrusion due to the drive cable and possibly tolerances in the old gears), but until I totally rebuilt the printer frame for rigidity and switched to 0.9 steppers, that artifacting was minor enough to be lost in the general delta "salmon skin" noise, even with a 32bit board. After that, though, I started looking for an alternative, and I just replaced it with a Bondtech LGX in a flying setup with a 13cm bowden. That's giving me substantially cleaner prints. The ripple issue is apparently well-known but not well-explained, and doesn't affect all Nimbles (I've heard it can appear on Flex3D remote drives as well). I may give the V3 Nimble a shot in the future, as supposedly they've ironed out those early manufacturing issues.
I just discovered this channel. Good explanation of the differences between the systems. I've only been 3d printing for 1.5 months and all 3 of my printers are delta's with bowden setups. I've successfully printed with PLA+, PetG and ABS and have yet to try flexible filaments. I see most of your printers are cartesian style 3d printers. One thing missing from your video (as it only applies to deltas) is the "flying extruder" mod to shorten the bowden tube. Your video gave me a better understanding of what people are trying to achieve with that mod so thank you!
i started with direct drive back in95 .back then it was the way to go as extruders for bowden setups were not available for purchase. since then i have used both and can say i prefer direct drive as it has less problems that can go wrong.
A bowden is easier to fix when clogged, the direct drives motor has to be remove and the parts unscrewed which can lead to wear and tear on the gantry. But the direct drive allows you to print flexible filament and is supposed to be faster because of the lower retraction distance to the nozzle. I've had many extrusion issues with my bowden setup but the print quality of both are very similar. In the end I think that, if you can afford it, you should get a direct drive but ultimately it comes down to slicer settings.
This to me is one of the biggest topics many do not seem to agree on so I thought it would be fun to visit since it has been some time since I have discussed this.
My Ender 3 has a Bowden setup and my wife's Flashforge has a direct drive. Both print well and are reliable. One thing I like better about the Bowden is the easier access to the hotend. A clog or some other hot end issue is far easier for me to get at and correct on the Ender than it is on the Flashforge. Just for something to do on a cold wet weekend, I purchased a PrinterMods direct drive adapter for my Ender 3. Guess I'll see if I like that setup or not. Poor little Ender rarely has a peaceful weekend :)
I think that the flashforge is also tougher to access because it is a different system than the Ender 3 which is based on the prusa design. The cross beams on the smooth rods can definitely make it trickier. With the Ender 3 being more open I do not think it will be much more difficult to access the hotend than it is now :)
How about a hybrid system? Bowden to deliver filament, but not perform any retraction or pressure advance actions. Small servo at the hot-end shifts the Bowden fitting relative to the nozzle, adjusting pressure/retracting. At the start of a line, the fitting is spaced at some set distance from the nozzle. As the hot-end accelerates, the servo drives the fitting closer to the nozzle, building pressure rapidly. Once the hot-end reaches print-speed, the spacing is held constant. As the hot-end slows down, the servo backs the fitting away from the nozzle, dropping pressure to zero, preventing a corner blob. The servo could start building pressure before the filament in the tube has a chance to start moving in the tube, thereby reducing 'starvation' at the beginning of a line! The pressure-modulation profile would match the acceleration profile for the hot-end, of course! For a non-printing move, the servo pulls back a tiny bit to make sure there is no residual nozzle pressure or dribbling. The Extruder motor only has to deliver a set amount of filament in a set amount of time, and can do so without fancy acceleration tricks. Linear Advance is a great idea, but it is rough on hardware! Since the Extruder is simply feeding stock, and regulation is done 'in the nozzle', stress on the Bowden fittings/motor/tube is greatly reduced. No retraction = less electrical power to the Extruder motor, less heat. No more push and pull; just a steady push, or stopped. BONUS!*BONUS! The servo driver, if it were a 'voice coil', could modulate nozzle pressure at fairly high frequencies...might be useful to selectively apply patterns or make properly tapered lines in a print.
I think X carriage weight is only something you should be concerned about on a CoreXY. On a Cartesian printer, the moving bed / Y carriage is going to be so much heavier than the X carriage that you will never be able to print truly fast while maintaining quality. People get obsessed over saving a few grams on their X carriage, while forgetting that the Y carriage / bed weighs at least a full kilogram more. Unless your firmware supports different print speeds for each axis (which is doesn't) you're only going to be able to print as fast as your slowest axis.
With Klipper Pressure advance, bowden now can really perform nicely! And I am speed junky, so I tend to stick with bowden, though I might switch to a orbiter one day.
Creality also has an affordable modular direct drive extruder. I'm trying it out now. It is the first mod on my new E3V2 printer, and the printer has not been used yet. This is my second E3V2 printer. My older printer still has the Bowden setup. I am not impressed with the Bowden tube extruder system. Creality's direct drive comes with all the necessary installation hardware parts. The package simply includes a photo identifying the ports on the v4.2.2 motherboard, and no instructions. However, installation is rather straightforward, and could be done in about an hour. After removing the extruder stepper motor, stock Bowden tube, and hot end from the X-axis gantry, I continued to disconnect the prior from the motherboard. Then, I installed the direct drive connections to the motherboard. The connections are identical to the stock equipment. Once finished, I only had to readjust the E-steps which were only slightly off. I need to tweak the printer a bit, i.e. bed-levelling, but everything is working fine. I did not weigh the unit, but I found it light. The only thing I don't like about this direct drive is that the extruder assembly is made of plastic just like the stock extruder. I'd replaced the plastic one for an aluminum one on my older printer after the lever cracked. The lever is notorious for doing this. The plastic extruder on the direct drive is installed behind the stepper motor, and should be replaceable with an aluminum one.
I switched to an all-metal hot-end on an Ender 3 and a few months later a BMG direct drive but no matter what settings I used I wasn't getting anywhere near the quality of my Bowden tube setup, I switched back to Bowden tube and had the best of both worlds, an all-metal hot-end to print high-temperature materials and good quality prints.
ive tried a bunch.. printed, amazon crap and more .. the micro Swiss dd setup with all metal hotend has been by far the best upgrade on all my machines. never had a singe problem at all . best 100 bucks you can spend on the machine
Direct drive I have heard also can misalign your x axis on the lead screw requiring dual z motors. Not sure because I decided to stick to bowden but I totally agree dual gear is 100% a big improvement and more worth moving to then changing drive setups
I could never go back to the nightmare of dealing with bowden , the couplings always work their way loose as the filament is pushed/pulled through the tube resulting in hot end clogs.
Thanks for the overview! I just installed a Micro Swiss direct drive on my Ender 5 pro and I'm excited to try it out once my replacement thermistor arrives. The stock extruder kept giving me trouble so I figured if I was going to upgrade I might as well go with something that would give me more flexibility (no pun intended) down the line.
Yeah I myself just ended up buying a Qidi X-Plus as I found they had the most 6 month reviews. So yes, most lasted more than 6 months but still. As well, needed TPU and Corbin Fiber to justify buying it more as a possible future utility.
I went with the ender 3 v2, i upgraded it on day one and the only thing i did not do was "upgrade" anything to do with the heat block, other then that i've bought/printed every upgrade for it and i couldn't be more pleased then i am now. im 100% new to this and tbh i was not expecting anything near what im getting... shit almost looks store bought, everyone should own one!
@@ModBotArmy better wheels, the better filament feeder with the better feeding tube, as well as new springs for the bed, BL Touch, and some better nozzles for when I'm feeling froggy and I feel like I won't drag it across the bed anymore. I currently have a glass bed but I also have the flexy metal one I can't remember the name that I haven't used yet in fear of the whole dragging the nozzle across the bed ordeal. But basically that's what I've done as well as make a custom profile on for cura that I've kinda be fine tuning here and there and I've got it in a enclosed ventilated area "closet" and tbh I've only had maby 5 failed prints out of the 50 or so I've done so far. All the measurements check out and I've not really had any problems so far, keep in mind I've only used PLA so far.
@@ModBotArmy also using you're videos and countless others regarding the ender I made sure to the best of my abilitys to make sure everything was as tight as it needed to be, cancel out any wobble level the bed etc as well as all these upgrades befor I even printed anything.
All my printers until now have been Bowden driven. But I'm about tô upgrade one to direct drive using the orbiter. The main reason was that my factory installed extruded broke and I realised that the change to direct drive would solve my problem quickly and allow me to use flexible filament with a bit more speed. That said, except for this and some small issues over time, I think that any good extruder should do a great job if well configured.
That is true. I still do not feel they are widely available and I am not really aware of any machines that they come stock with. I am sure this may change over the next few years.
@@ModBotArmy You are correct on all counts but with the release of the orbiter extruder V1.5 they went from sls to injection molding. Thats a big investment and a large bottleneck removed in supply chain i'm thinking we will see a lot more of it. Maybe a few printers in fourth quarter of 2021?
Great video. My printer came with a bowden and I am ready to swap it for a direct. I print at similar speeds as you (50mm/s) and I want to print with different filaments which bowden will not be capable of.
I have to repair my Bowden at least once every couple months. I will never buy another. The four Achilles heals of the Bowden are as follows. 1) After a while, the Bowden tube fittings fail to properly secure the Bowden tube, which means you can't use retraction and you get really bad prints. As small as 1 mm movement at the extruder is death. 2) Poor dimensional tolerances of the teflon tube mean that with one tube, the prints are OK, but with another, they suck. Those aftermarket blue tubes usually solve this problem. 3) Whenever there is a filament feed problem and your not there watching, the hot end will melt the end of the teflon tube plugging it. The only way to fix it is to cut off the end of or replace the teflon tube and replace your nozzle. 4) Whenever filament flow is affected by any of the above, the extruder grinds the filament into dust.
Damn it sounds like you have had a hell of a time. What printer or printers are you using? Have you thought about swapping it over to Direct or you dont want to deal with it?
I think what's most important is the hotend components. If you are using a Bowden system on a crappy hotend, then the extruder is hitting a lot more backpressure. A direct drive allows the printer to somewhat push through and overcome bad hotend designs. At the end of the day, they both do the same job of pushing filament, and if designed for their ecosystem well both will perform their job well. Heck, the Ultimaker line of 3d Printers are all bowden setups and they don't seem to have any issues.
i only searched this, since i only care about the overall asthetics of the printer :) i think bowden printers sometimes can look ugly in the head area, since the weird wiring... while the direct drive extruder don't have any ugly wiring at all.
if this is your first printer, let me try and help: it doesn't matter. what matters is that its common enough that you can do basically anything with it down the line. because as you 3D print, you're going to find out certain things matter FOR YOU and certain things don't, and being able to modify your printer to fit what you want it to do is most important. there are a lot of companies out there with tons of aftermarket support. get a printer with good aftermarket and learn what you care about and what you don't, then upgrade accordingly
You're very knowledgeable and I love your simplistic explanations. Please get into every angle of monetization. I truly believe 3dp will go to the moon this next two years because good kits are getting under $300.
Thank you very much. I have some additional ideas and sponsorships I would like to work on so that I can dedicate more time to creating content and experimenting. I appreciate it and agree that 3dp is only getting cheaper and better.
@@ModBotArmy the original extruder but with a 5€ conversion kit from Aliexpress and it works great. I think you could make a similar video for bowden type hotend vs all metal. For me the Ender 3 has been my introduction in 3D printing and I learned a lot. But sometimes I ask myself the question if it wasn't better to just spend the extra cash on a Prusa instead of a cheap Ender 3 where all the cheap upgrades together make a substantial amount. Probably a good topic for a video ;-): Can you transform the Ender 3 an all-round workhorse: direct drive, abl, flex steel sheet, all metal hotend to print at high temps, good quality prints and still be cheaper than a Prusa i3 mk3s
I think (but havent measured!) that the extra weight of a direct drive extruder rarely matters. 3D Printer frames are fairly stiff nowadays and in most cases the maximum acceleration you can get will be limited by the Y axis anyways. Bedslingers need to move the heavy bed and CoreXYs the heavier gantry. Especially for larger CoreXY style printers a bowden tube is a pain due to needed length. You either get a lot of strining even with PLA or you need to retract a lot of distance. Not only does that slow down the print a lot but can also cayse a lot of extruder grinding on the same filament position leading to feed issues.
Just switched my CR-10 over to a direct drive, I like it, but I've found it's WAY more sensitive to bed levelling issues. If the bed isn't perfectly level, the first 5 or so layers come out wobbly.
Interesting that is not something I have noticed before on my machines. I dont see why that would be the case. I would check to make sure your z axis isnt having issues. I have an Ender 3 right now and it is stock but the Z motor seems to be binding on the first few layers so they turn out rough.
@@ModBotArmy hmmm that's good to know. it's a fairly well used CR-10 thats now going on a year old. auto bed leveling seems to work fine, and worked fine with the bowden setup right before switching, but the extra weight could be making the difference. thanks for the info!
One thing I would do is take the fan cover off and check to make sure the screws holding the hot end against the back plater tight. I bought a direct drive extruder from Creality and that was what had happened to mine. Now it prints perfectly. Or at least as perfectly as a noob with less than 5 months experience can make print. I have both of my Ender 3 printers tuned well enough so I can print the Maker's Muse tolerance test so that all five of the dials turn at .10 layer height.
@@KLP99 hmm interesting thought. I seem to have solved the problem with a textured PEI plate as opposed to a matte one, but I will definitely check those screws.
@@bepstein111 I decided to get the Creality glass covers. They are awesome. I also use either Magigoo or Layerneer. The more I use the latter the better I like it.
I have a BIQU BX Printer which comes with the BIQU H2 Direct Drive Extruder. This DD Extruder only weights 209g. This Printer is a workhorse!!! The H2 is lightweight and one of the best Direct Drives i ever had.
I am jealous! I have the B1 and love it and have the H2 which I plan on installing but I would love to try a BX out of the box to see what it is all about. Did you back it on Kickstarter?
@@ModBotArmy no, i am working for a big online retailer and the BX was given to me for testing. In my opinion the BX is one of the best printers out of the box. I use the printer every day since 1 month and it works like a charm.
I've never had my Bowden tube pop from a push-fitting but I didn't use them for long. Push-fittings fittings had too much play for my taste, even with retainers, so I didn't use them long. I switched to conventional compression fittings and never went back.
I don’t understand how the direct drive can be better in the retraction area. If the extruder is retracting the filament a half an inch, it would be the same half inch regardless if the motor driving the gears is 3 inches from the hit end, or 12. They’re both still pulling the filament from the same spot, just one set up has 12 inches of filament in front of it, and the other has 3. I guess the argument can be that it’s easier to push 3 inches of a material than 12 inches of a material, but we’re talking about an extremely lite weight material.
As far as I know, do whatever works well. It can help to improve adhesion but in my experience it's a slight effect but that could just be me. I'll use slow perimeters though.
@@ModBotArmy it wastes alot of filament with the purge block, I got it for a commission that never worked out but now I just use it as a single filament printer beacuse I don't like the amount of waste it produces.
I am going to modify my (relatively new) Anet ET4 Pro from bowden type to direct drive, I already printed the part needed. I‘m also printing with low speeds around 50mm/s, so a bigger mass on the x-axis is no big deal, I hope. The idea of using a smaller / thinner stepper motor for the extruder is great, haven‘t thought for that. If the mass has issues on the x-axis, I will try that. My intention is to print more parts with TPU in the next time, so a direct drive is necessary to do so. Thanks for the information given by your video.
I would start with the full size motor like you said and if you run into issues (I doubt you will) try smaller. I think you are going to really like it. What extruder are you going with?
@@ModBotArmy : It‘s the one the Anet was shipped with, I don‘t know its name. But yesterday - when I started with the „project“ - I had to stop it. After disassembling the extruder I found out that the developer of the adapter forgot about the proximity sensor used for bed levelling. It‘s not accessible anymore. So I had to modify the part and print it again, but it‘s now not stable anymore. But I found a new solution idea on YT I want to build after modifying it so that my filament sensor can be also part of the moving head. In this new solution the extruder motor is turned 90 degrees and now oriented along the y-axis. The disadvantage is that now the CoG of the moving head is far away from the rail and that makes me not so happy. The attrition of the wheels will be much higher then. So maybe I come back to the first (modified) solution after I increased the stability. Worst thing is that a print of this adapter lasts more than 7 hours...
Ok, done. I designed the extended adapter and printed it, I ordered longer cables for extruder and filament sensor (and modified them a bit, the cable length and the pin layout had to be changed), and assembled everything. Took me about 3 hours because I also changed the complete hot end (I was not able to disassemble it without damage, real low quality). Fun fact: Even I changed the hot end, I had not to correct the levelling. Now it‘s printing the first parts and it looks good. Thank you for encouraging me to change my printer within the warranty time period. Meanwhile the printer is ready, the result looks good!
Dr. Vax has published a video on a very similar topic pretty recently. He made the point that, in his experience, DD printers are faster than Bowden printers because they don't need to retract the filament as far as Bowden style printers have to and therefore waste less time. As I only have a single printer and it's the Ender 3 Pro both your explanation and his sound reasonable - what do you think about this?
That would be a good experiment. I think the more retractions you have in the gcode, the advantage would go to the direct drive. When I was setting up the CR-6SE for PETG, I had to go over 10mm retraction distance. On my direct drives I am at 0.7 to 0.8. That is a lot of difference, if there are a lot of retractions.
I'm having a lot of trouble printing tpu with a bowden printer, as well you have a limit of nozzle sizes. Greg wade's extruder ftw. lol It never fails, it creates so much torque, which simple bowdens never will. I have 4 greg wades, 2 of which drive 1mm printing nozzles. My little bowden unit is cute for small diameters but it has zero overhead. I guess you can actually use a greg wade with bowdens though which might be a fix for my tpu problem.
I've been fighting with my 6' delta to dial in bowden. I'm using duet, PA settings, and bondtech qr extruder, and a mosquito magnum hotend. Due to the size of the delta, the bowden tube is over 500 mm long, and am using a 0.8mm nozzle. No matter how I dial it in and compensate, either blobs occur or it leaves gaps. I finally threw in the towel and am switching to a flying extruder. Bowden works for shorter runs, and smaller nozzles, but a big delta like I'm running, dialing it in is 2 steps forward 1 step back.
Yeah that is tough on a Delta that large. I had a large Delta for a short while that was very tall and I could not get good consistent prints out of it. I hope the swap does the trick for you.
@@ModBotArmy the flying extruder worked perfectly. Absolutely the cleanest prints. No ringing, no blobs, retraction setting is now 1.5mm. Using a bmg with a pancake stepper. Has no problems keeping with a high flow hotend and fast prints. The big heavy bondtech qr will go into the spares bin for a future build.
I have only had Bowden drives, but I have had issues with the PTFE tubes coming unseated during a print on 2 occasions. Eventually the claws in the grip wear out. I have also had the issue on the hot end where over time a gap opens up between the end of the PTFE tube and the heat brake, and melted filament builds up in there and you end up with under extrusion.
Interesting. I wonder if it is best practice to replace the bowden tube or the ptfe fittings after a certain number of print hours. I feel like it is to difficult to figure out how long or how many hours that is unless someone sets up a test bench just to check that.
Bowden is only faster if you are printing at high speeds. If you are printing for quality, it is definitely slower if you are printing at 60mm/s or slower, as the retraction distance and speed become a significant factor in your overall printing speed. If printing high speed at a reduced quality is what you need (this obviously eliminates flexibles), then Bowden is definitely your best option. I like the Micro Swiss all metal direct drive extruder as well, as I can easily increase the temperature of the print chamber up to 100°C w/o needing to worry about plastic parts failing. It also places the motor on the back side of the plate, which better balances the weight to each side of the plate. Unfortunately, Micro Swiss told me that they’re too busy to work on modifications for linear rail systems, so I’ll need to grind down the plate that I have, in order to mount it on top of a linear rail. BTW, while printing with a direct drive extruder, have you also tried different slicers on that same machine? I had been using Cura, as pretty much everyone was using it, and PrusaSlicer wasn’t around. However, I really like the layout of PruscaSlicer better from an engineering standpoint. So, I dialed in settings for both slicers, and I’ve found that not only are the PrusaSlicer prints slightly faster, they don't have the ringing that I see with Cura sliced prints. It’s like PrusaSlicer has some kind a anti-ringing in their slicing. P.S. In case you don’t recognize me, my other channel is Kaelum. I’m finally getting this new channel setup. 😎
They just released a linear rail version! I am going to be installing it onto a machine in a couple of weeks. If you have not ground down your plate dont haha. I hope that I caught you before. I am 100% on Cura at the moment as I have been very happy with it for years but I also think the best slicer out there is the one that works for you. I know a lot of people swear by Prusa Slicer. I may have to do some slicing and see which comes out on top. Definitely a lot to consider. Awesome :) good luck with the new channel
@@ModBotArmy I was going to start tomorrow. Are you talking about their side mounted linear rail, which requires the belt to rotate vertically? The Ender 5 Plus needs the belt to rotate horizontally around the extrusion. If I grind it down, I'll have more than enough room to install an endoscopic camera and additional LED lighting as well. Once I get Creality to fix the extremely loud squealing of the Z screws, I'm going to rotate the Y-axis belts to be horizontal with dual Y-axis motors, so that the Y-axis belts run horizontally as well. I considered other options, but all of them would have doubled the backlash by doubling the number of pullies on each side of the Y-axis. I'm currently researching 32 bit MBs that support dual Z, dual Y, single X, a single extruder, built-in networking (optional), and full support for OctoPrint. The nice thing about this design is that the Y-axis will be a dual duplication of the X-axis, so I should be able to use many of the machined parts that Creality is already making. Sort of an Ender 5 Plus v2 design, if you will. :) I'm pretty sure that Cura and PrusaSlicer will both have the exact same features, and abilities, in the future while offering different methods of working. I was interested in knowing if you had observed the same things. Anywho, for now the channel is just a hobby, but who knows. Thanks for the reply!
I come from Anet A8 still my only one 3D printing I have only changed the body for a custom aluminum weld by myself and the board cuz it bur out lately and lately I've been starting to se an increment in gosting.
With a large print, the heat of the nozzle has time to travel up the line of the filament itself and since the link with the bowden tube guide is plastic AND the weakest link in the chain, it pops off once it's warm enough. Maybe if the print is 12 horus, they can break up into 6hrs with a rest in between?
What about people who have pet birds that are concerned about PTFE fumes , what is the most PTFE free setup? if the direct drive has a short PTFE tube and it is going to an all metal hot end does the PTFE tube still heat up at all? you said some have no PTFE tube at all , is there a kit that includes a direct drive and all metal hot end for the ender 3/ pro with no PTFE?
The heat should dissipate before it reaches the PTFE tube and cause it to decompose IF you have an all metal hotend that is. If you want to go an extra step to prevent any chance of fumes coming from PTFE I’d suggest an enclosure with good sealing and air filtration (which can give you the added bonus of being able to print with ABS if you ever wanted to )
I have a MicroSwiss full kit on my ender 3 pro and haven't looked back haha the speeds and clean prints I have gotten blows the ender 3 pro stock out of the water , debating about making my chiron direct drive
I find my results worsened once I switched to the MS kit. I've set my E-steps to 142.9 and retraction to 1 mm at 35 mm/s, printing at 40mm/s. Mind sharing your settings?
Yeah I love mine as well. I have a temporary stock Ender 3 and it is not nearly as enjoyable to use as the one with the MS DD. I think I may have spoiled myself :p
@@yony120 I don't have any crazy settings especially since instead of setting esteps (I always mess up) I 3d printed a cr6 filament guide just flattened a little and that solved my problems but I run 3.5 mm retraction and I print 50mm typically but for the most it's just stock settings I change settings more so depending on the print 🤫
@@ModBotArmy oh yeah I totally feel you with spoiling yourself haha I have a cr6 that I feel I just wanted money on because I thought oh auto bed leveling will save so much time but I spend more time fixing it then I do anything else plus manual leveling is now so much better when I have experience haha
I have an Ender 5 and was thinking of moving the extruder to the top of the printer and shorting the bowden tube considerably as well as using a capricorn tube as well as adding an EZR extruder. Does this make sense or should I just go with direct drive?
Great info. thanks. Recently bought a Kywoo3d Tycoon which has a direct drive. Works well with pla. With any flexible filament it jambs up on the outlet of the drive gear and pulley wheel… not feeding into hot end thru the ptfe tube that is inside the hot end above the nozzle. tried 240c at 10mm/s and jambs right away. any thoughts?
I am having retraction issues (oozing), tried everything from retraction distance/speed calibrations, PID tunning, replacing nozzle, filament feed tunning, different combing settings, temp calibration... would this something direct drive can help with? I am printing basic Overture PLA.
Thanks for the video. It sounds like upgrading to Capricorn tubing and a dual gear extruder on a Bowden feed printer would be a good way to go for a first printer. I don't foresee really wanting to print flexible material so the only other upgrade I'd be doing would be an all metal copper hot end since I would like to be able to print nylon and some other higher temp materials.
Yeah if you do not need to print with flexibles honestly a good extruder, capricorn and all metal hotend will let you print with a huge catalog of materials.
I actually have had good luck so far with high speed TPU 95 with my stock (Bowden) extruder setup on my ender 3 pro, just printing at 30mm/s so far though. Bought a dual drive for the stepper and will try to up the speed once I install it. I love the TPU for printing table top minis since they flex rather than snap when they get tossed into a box or fall on the floor.
There is moving table in i3 style printers plus weight of printed detail versus weight of direct drive extruder. Manufacturers like bowden due to they can make $100 printers. It works while customer printing benchies with PLA.
Nice vid. One remark, though : you shouldn't say "Direct Drive" as an extruder style since it's misleading and a misnomer. "Direct Drive" is a filament drive mechanism, not a filament feed mechanism, since there are 2 direct extruder styles : full direct (motor AND drive gears attached to the X carriage) and remote direct (drive gears attached to the X carriage, motor mounted on the printer frame).
I swear that when I got my first printer, with a direct drive, everyone was talking about how great the Bowden drives are. And as soon as I got a printer with a Bowden drive, suddenly everyone thinks that direct drive is better. 🙄
same here got a cheap ctc 3d printer after a lot of mods got good prints one of the things was converting to bowden to remove weight from X axis i still use bowden now don't see the point of changing....
Great vid as usual. I'm a bowden man but only cuz my ender has one. I am interested in maybe looking at trying a direct drive kit for my ender 3 pro. Also I just had for the first time that dreaded bowden tube pop out from the extruder and a the nest that followed. It was really weird and couldn't figure out the reason. I think it was the tube being too long and cut it down after your vid opening my eyes to the fact that it was too long.
Thank you :D Oh no! I hope I didnt jinx your printer haha. It has happened to me to. The bowden tube can get worn down so cutting it and making sure its firmly pushed in should really help.
Thanks for the video Good Question Bowden vs Direct drive I'm Thinking direct drive because I want to Print flexible filaments point 6 or 8 novel Also This will be my First 3-D printer So I am looking for 300x300x400 like Sidewinder X1 but the X2 coming out soon & Atomstack Cambrian 3D printer.
Thank you for the video, I am still looking at making a purchase (probably within the next day or two) and I am just trying to see what is available that will not take days to put together and can still be reasonably versatile. Although, if it did not take more than a month to get a prebuilt Prusa i3 mk3s+, I am leaning towards an Ender V2 because of the delivery time. I was concerned about the direct drive verus bowden 3d printer extruder and your video addressed some of my concerns.
Hey Larry! Thanks for watching. The Ender 3 V2 is not a bad machine from everything I have seen. If you do decide down the road you can always upgrade it but for a starter printer there is a lot to learn and it really is a solid option.
for me personally, I started out with a bowden setup, and I'll be honest, its because I didn't do any research. friend said "this is a good brand" and I bought one of their printers, and it worked great for me for a while. then I got into printing more exotic filaments, and I found my setup had problems, especially with filament like TPU. Fortunately my friend had not steered me wrong, because the brand they told me was Creality and the printer I bought was the Ender 3 V2, which has massive aftermarket support, and I upgraded to Direct Drive and an all metal hot end in one go with Microswiss. Ultimately what it came down to for me is that long print times were not as important to me as the end product looking nice, and being able to use the filament I wanted. I'm not saying bowden is bad, But I am saying for those out there that want to be able to print any filament they desire and are okay waiting for their prints to be done, Direct Drive is absolutely the way to go. really, the best advice I have is make sure you can change if you decide your needs change. I kept my bowden extruder, because if in the future my needs change, and I want volume and don't care what filament, I might just change back.
I don't understand why if people want direct drive but worry about the added weight why can't you upgrade to a more powerful extruder motor? would that work? or is it the frame that can't handle the weight?
I've just got into 3d printing with an Ender 3 pro and love that machine. Some random gripe about nomenclature: It does seem like in the 3D printing world, these terms have become standard, but it's weird to me to call the filament feed servo the "extruder" while what I would actually call the extruder is called the "hot end" If anything is to be called an extruder, shouldn't it be the nozzle? (since it's doing the extruding)
Thanks Jonas! And definitely an install/overview/print quality. I am pretty backed up on videos doing one a week so it may be quite a bit but absolutely.
Good vid! I just find direct drive much more reliable with less issues and better longevity over Bowden in general.
Thanks Llama! Yeah there is definitely less going on. I do also feel like I run into less issues with a direct drive. I like both but if I had to choose definitely on the direct drive train.
I just like to add that when I bought a pre-built direct drive extruder for one of my Ender 3 printers I used it for a while and the print quality was just not very good so I took it apart and I found that the two screws that hold the hot end to the back plate were loose. Both of them were loose.
I have found that poor print quality sometimes is caused if the hot end is not at right angles to the bed.
Because of that, one of the first things I do while I'm putting a new printer together, is to make sure everything is perfectly square including the hot end in relation to the bed. Everything on the printer must be absolutely square and at perfect right angles all around, and of course, all of the wheels tight enough against the extrusions that there is no wobble.
Because the nozzle is so tiny, it's not a huge deal when they're a little bit out of square, but it does affect print quality and even more if you use ironing.
Thanks for posting. I'm a 54 y.o. noob at 3D printing (got my Ender 3 V2 three weeks ago) but have jumped in with both feet. I'm interested in print quality and reliability above speed, and therefore have made the decision to go with a direct drive (will order the Orbiter this weekend). With the issues I've had with the stock extruder, the time I save by not having to fiddle with it can be put toward actually printing, which increases my productivity. Add to this the greater versatility of DD systems, and for me it's a no-brainer.
how did changing to direct drive go?
I just recently switched to DD on my (heavily modified, at least for my standards) Ender 3 after hearing a very compelling argument: It's a bedslinger, so the X axis, even with the weight of the motor, is still less than that on the Y axis. I have an ADXL345 accelerometer for resonance compensation so I thought hey, I can check that⁽¹⁾. Sure enough, I _could_ go up to a max of ~16k acceleration on the X axis, but only 4700 on the Y axis. Since both axis are linked in most slicers, the Y axis will _always_ ⁽²⁾ be the limiting factor for a bedslinger. So, at least for that type of printer, the weight of the hotend carriage is, functionally, a non-issue (ignoring wear and tear for a second). The advantages of a) being able to print TPEs and b) less clogging on an all-metal hotend due to less retraction are just much more beneficial, at least for my use case. Not saying it's "the perfect upgrade that everybody should use™", but don't get dissuaded just because somebody tells you it'll make the carriage too heavy.
⁽¹⁾: I just did another test run with my DD setup: Klipper suggests max_accel
Exactly this. Did the same thing to my E3, won't go back, there are basically no drawbacks.
That was my thought process, but I didn't have figures to back up my intuition. Thanks!
Team: have an all around printer that works perfectly for 90% of your needs, then other printer(s) you change to be specialty printers for the remaining 10%.
Yeah that is not a bad idea. That is pretty much my ideal setup.
I have 15 machines on my print farm and over the years, I have upgraded as many as I can to direct drive. It's just so reliable for all my material types and I don't have those dreaded Bowden Tube popping out from the hot end or extruder issues some stock printers are notorious for.
Damn what direct drive system are you using on the upgraded units? That tube popping out is such a waste of time and materials.
@@ModBotArmy I have 3 CR-10S machines upgraded to the Bondtech Direct Drive System. It’s super easy to install. They offer the firmware for it and even a version if you opt to install a BL Touch (mine do). It’s a “what’s your time worth “ kind of upgrade. Very quick to do. I like that direct drive setup so much I’ve had them make me a few (minus the Creality wiring) to install onto other machines that have the same CR-10 style carriage. Check my channel for my DDS install video 🙂
I just upgraded to direct drive on my ender 3 a few days ago, so far I love it. It's so much more reliable, I haven't had a single clog so far. The only downside is that they are more prone to ringing, but it's worth it
WOW! Was that 16min in one take?
Oh yeah haha I always shoot my portion in one take.
New to the topic, first printer ordered yesterday. In my budget I had to choose between direct drive or dual z-steppers. Chose the later. It's nice to hear that upgrades at a later point are feasable without need for a whole new printer.
You can print a conversion for Bowden to DD.
Ender 3 pro. Added linear rails to (y) axis and (x) plus 2 z motors and the direct drive . The linear rail on (x) helps with the added weight. Love it.
im fairly new to 3d printing. i bought an ender 3 v2 and a short time after testing it i bought a direct drive extruder to install while installed an all metal hotend and it made life much easier and the prints much better.
The quality i'm getting printing PETG with a direct drive compared to a Bowden setup makes it worth all the way for me. i go through allooot of PETG and the Print finish/quality is just perfect with it i pretty much have Zero stringing and all i need to do is remove some support and the parts are done nothing to clean up. when i was running bowden i always had some stringing and needed to cleanup the parts a bit.
I feel like with PET-G on most bowden setups I get some stringing and occasional blobs. I also feel like dd seems to remove most of this for me. I have done quite a bit of PETG on bowden but I definitely have experienced what you are mentioning.
I recently purchased a Biqi B1 and prefer it immensely over my old Deltaprintr. I did swap the extruder over to the EZR and cut the bowden tube as short as possible. It's running like a champ and I was able to print with TPU without recalibrating.
That is awesome! I love my B1 so much. I only have space to run a couple of printers right now in this place but I really want to do more printing on that machine.
For me allways direct drive. You can use light extruder because the resistance on the filament is less, usually higher flow and easy to print more filaments. For a Prusa style printer it goes all the way, because the bed is heavy and the X axis doesn't matter if you add a bit more weight
For a CoreXY maybe bowden is a better choice because of the rapid movement you could have. But with sturdy frame and big motors you can have a Direct drive and still print at 100mm/s at 3000-5000mm/s2 acc
I ran a Zesty Nimble V1.2 on my delta for about two years. I'd be happy to answer questions about remote drive stuff out of my experience.
My thoughts: It's a great system for taking weight off the effector without losing the short filament path that flexibles prefer. It did take a fair bit of tuning to get working well, but their documentation and support is good. Unfortunately mine was an older production model and had "Ripple" issues (slight periodic over/underextrusion due to the drive cable and possibly tolerances in the old gears), but until I totally rebuilt the printer frame for rigidity and switched to 0.9 steppers, that artifacting was minor enough to be lost in the general delta "salmon skin" noise, even with a 32bit board. After that, though, I started looking for an alternative, and I just replaced it with a Bondtech LGX in a flying setup with a 13cm bowden. That's giving me substantially cleaner prints. The ripple issue is apparently well-known but not well-explained, and doesn't affect all Nimbles (I've heard it can appear on Flex3D remote drives as well). I may give the V3 Nimble a shot in the future, as supposedly they've ironed out those early manufacturing issues.
I just discovered this channel. Good explanation of the differences between the systems. I've only been 3d printing for 1.5 months and all 3 of my printers are delta's with bowden setups. I've successfully printed with PLA+, PetG and ABS and have yet to try flexible filaments. I see most of your printers are cartesian style 3d printers. One thing missing from your video (as it only applies to deltas) is the "flying extruder" mod to shorten the bowden tube. Your video gave me a better understanding of what people are trying to achieve with that mod so thank you!
i started with direct drive back in95 .back then it was the way to go as extruders for bowden setups were not available for purchase. since then i have used both and can say i prefer direct drive as it has less problems that can go wrong.
This was the best description I’ve seen. Thanks.
A bowden is easier to fix when clogged, the direct drives motor has to be remove and the parts unscrewed which can lead to wear and tear on the gantry. But the direct drive allows you to print flexible filament and is supposed to be faster because of the lower retraction distance to the nozzle. I've had many extrusion issues with my bowden setup but the print quality of both are very similar. In the end I think that, if you can afford it, you should get a direct drive but ultimately it comes down to slicer settings.
the greatest debate of all times
This to me is one of the biggest topics many do not seem to agree on so I thought it would be fun to visit since it has been some time since I have discussed this.
My Ender 3 has a Bowden setup and my wife's Flashforge has a direct drive. Both print well and are reliable. One thing I like better about the Bowden is the easier access to the hotend. A clog or some other hot end issue is far easier for me to get at and correct on the Ender than it is on the Flashforge. Just for something to do on a cold wet weekend, I purchased a PrinterMods direct drive adapter for my Ender 3. Guess I'll see if I like that setup or not. Poor little Ender rarely has a peaceful weekend :)
I think that the flashforge is also tougher to access because it is a different system than the Ender 3 which is based on the prusa design. The cross beams on the smooth rods can definitely make it trickier. With the Ender 3 being more open I do not think it will be much more difficult to access the hotend than it is now :)
I printed a direct drive adapter for the ender 3 V2, couldn't be happier. Retraction under a millimeter typically a half
How about a hybrid system?
Bowden to deliver filament, but not perform any retraction or pressure advance actions.
Small servo at the hot-end shifts the Bowden fitting relative to the nozzle, adjusting pressure/retracting.
At the start of a line, the fitting is spaced at some set distance from the nozzle.
As the hot-end accelerates, the servo drives the fitting closer to the nozzle, building pressure rapidly.
Once the hot-end reaches print-speed, the spacing is held constant.
As the hot-end slows down, the servo backs the fitting away from the nozzle, dropping pressure to zero, preventing a corner blob.
The servo could start building pressure before the filament in the tube has a chance to start moving in the tube, thereby reducing 'starvation' at the beginning of a line!
The pressure-modulation profile would match the acceleration profile for the hot-end, of course!
For a non-printing move, the servo pulls back a tiny bit to make sure there is no residual nozzle pressure or dribbling.
The Extruder motor only has to deliver a set amount of filament in a set amount of time, and can do so without fancy acceleration tricks.
Linear Advance is a great idea, but it is rough on hardware!
Since the Extruder is simply feeding stock, and regulation is done 'in the nozzle', stress on the Bowden fittings/motor/tube is greatly reduced.
No retraction = less electrical power to the Extruder motor, less heat.
No more push and pull; just a steady push, or stopped.
BONUS!*BONUS!
The servo driver, if it were a 'voice coil', could modulate nozzle pressure at fairly high frequencies...might be useful to selectively apply patterns or make properly tapered lines in a print.
I think X carriage weight is only something you should be concerned about on a CoreXY. On a Cartesian printer, the moving bed / Y carriage is going to be so much heavier than the X carriage that you will never be able to print truly fast while maintaining quality. People get obsessed over saving a few grams on their X carriage, while forgetting that the Y carriage / bed weighs at least a full kilogram more. Unless your firmware supports different print speeds for each axis (which is doesn't) you're only going to be able to print as fast as your slowest axis.
This is also a great point. Especially if you have a heavy bed that has glass on it that will really limit how quickly it can qhip around.
With Klipper Pressure advance, bowden now can really perform nicely! And I am speed junky, so I tend to stick with bowden, though I might switch to a orbiter one day.
I'm rather impressed how quickly I can turn up the print speed of my Ender 3 with plain PLA.
direct is much faster because of short retracts
@@___15 crazy that I said that a little over one year ago ? soooo wrong that was haha. direct drive is the way
My Ender 3 is direct drive and my Ender 5 Plus is Bowden drive. It's a good setup for me. Thanks for the useful content! Keep it up.
Nice! That is currently how mine is as well but I will be converting the Ender 5 Plus soon. I really want to enclose the E5. Thanks for watching. :)
Creality also has an affordable modular direct drive extruder. I'm trying it out now. It is the first mod on my new E3V2 printer, and the printer has not been used yet. This is my second E3V2 printer. My older printer still has the Bowden setup. I am not impressed with the Bowden tube extruder system.
Creality's direct drive comes with all the necessary installation hardware parts. The package simply includes a photo identifying the ports on the v4.2.2 motherboard, and no instructions. However, installation is rather straightforward, and could be done in about an hour. After removing the extruder stepper motor, stock Bowden tube, and hot end from the X-axis gantry, I continued to disconnect the prior from the motherboard. Then, I installed the direct drive connections to the motherboard. The connections are identical to the stock equipment. Once finished, I only had to readjust the E-steps which were only slightly off. I need to tweak the printer a bit, i.e. bed-levelling, but everything is working fine.
I did not weigh the unit, but I found it light. The only thing I don't like about this direct drive is that the extruder assembly is made of plastic just like the stock extruder. I'd replaced the plastic one for an aluminum one on my older printer after the lever cracked. The lever is notorious for doing this. The plastic extruder on the direct drive is installed behind the stepper motor, and should be replaceable with an aluminum one.
I switched to an all-metal hot-end on an Ender 3 and a few months later a BMG direct drive but no matter what settings I used I wasn't getting anywhere near the quality of my Bowden tube setup, I switched back to Bowden tube and had the best of both worlds, an all-metal hot-end to print high-temperature materials and good quality prints.
Interesting. Are you still using the BMG? Just as a Bowden setup?
@@ModBotArmy Yes but I took it off my Ender 3 and put it on my CR-10
ive tried a bunch.. printed, amazon crap and more .. the micro Swiss dd setup with all metal hotend has been by far the best upgrade on all my machines. never had a singe problem at all . best 100 bucks you can spend on the machine
Microswiss direct drive with the all metal hotend. Thanks for the great channel.
Hell Yeah! Thanks for watching :)
Direct drive I have heard also can misalign your x axis on the lead screw requiring dual z motors.
Not sure because I decided to stick to bowden but I totally agree dual gear is 100% a big improvement and more worth moving to then changing drive setups
I could never go back to the nightmare of dealing with bowden , the couplings always work their way loose as the filament is pushed/pulled through the tube resulting in hot end clogs.
Thanks for the overview! I just installed a Micro Swiss direct drive on my Ender 5 pro and I'm excited to try it out once my replacement thermistor arrives. The stock extruder kept giving me trouble so I figured if I was going to upgrade I might as well go with something that would give me more flexibility (no pun intended) down the line.
Yeah I myself just ended up buying a Qidi X-Plus as I found they had the most 6 month reviews. So yes, most lasted more than 6 months but still. As well, needed TPU and Corbin Fiber to justify buying it more as a possible future utility.
I went with the ender 3 v2, i upgraded it on day one and the only thing i did not do was "upgrade" anything to do with the heat block, other then that i've bought/printed every upgrade for it and i couldn't be more pleased then i am now. im 100% new to this and tbh i was not expecting anything near what im getting... shit almost looks store bought, everyone should own one!
What were the upgrades that you did to it??
@@ModBotArmy better wheels, the better filament feeder with the better feeding tube, as well as new springs for the bed, BL Touch, and some better nozzles for when I'm feeling froggy and I feel like I won't drag it across the bed anymore. I currently have a glass bed but I also have the flexy metal one I can't remember the name that I haven't used yet in fear of the whole dragging the nozzle across the bed ordeal. But basically that's what I've done as well as make a custom profile on for cura that I've kinda be fine tuning here and there and I've got it in a enclosed ventilated area "closet" and tbh I've only had maby 5 failed prints out of the 50 or so I've done so far. All the measurements check out and I've not really had any problems so far, keep in mind I've only used PLA so far.
@@ModBotArmy also using you're videos and countless others regarding the ender I made sure to the best of my abilitys to make sure everything was as tight as it needed to be, cancel out any wobble level the bed etc as well as all these upgrades befor I even printed anything.
All my printers until now have been Bowden driven. But I'm about tô upgrade one to direct drive using the orbiter. The main reason was that my factory installed extruded broke and I realised that the change to direct drive would solve my problem quickly and allow me to use flexible filament with a bit more speed. That said, except for this and some small issues over time, I think that any good extruder should do a great job if well configured.
For me its not a debate anymore with things like the sherpa mini and orbiter extruder you can have both
That is true. I still do not feel they are widely available and I am not really aware of any machines that they come stock with. I am sure this may change over the next few years.
@@ModBotArmy You are correct on all counts but with the release of the orbiter extruder V1.5 they went from sls to injection molding. Thats a big investment and a large bottleneck removed in supply chain i'm thinking we will see a lot more of it. Maybe a few printers in fourth quarter of 2021?
Bowden works better with 2.85mm filament but it's perfectly workable with 1,75 if you tweak your settings a little bit.
this is exactly the information I was looking for. thank you
Great video. My printer came with a bowden and I am ready to swap it for a direct. I print at similar speeds as you (50mm/s) and I want to print with different filaments which bowden will not be capable of.
That XYZ printer was a beast. Still have mine in sitting in a corner.
would be good if you said more about the common type of failures and remedies and upgrades you can do with bowden
I have to repair my Bowden at least once every couple months. I will never buy another. The four Achilles heals of the Bowden are as follows.
1) After a while, the Bowden tube fittings fail to properly secure the Bowden tube, which means you can't use retraction and you get really bad prints. As small as 1 mm movement at the extruder is death.
2) Poor dimensional tolerances of the teflon tube mean that with one tube, the prints are OK, but with another, they suck. Those aftermarket blue tubes usually solve this problem.
3) Whenever there is a filament feed problem and your not there watching, the hot end will melt the end of the teflon tube plugging it. The only way to fix it is to cut off the end of or replace the teflon tube and replace your nozzle.
4) Whenever filament flow is affected by any of the above, the extruder grinds the filament into dust.
Damn it sounds like you have had a hell of a time. What printer or printers are you using? Have you thought about swapping it over to Direct or you dont want to deal with it?
I think what's most important is the hotend components. If you are using a Bowden system on a crappy hotend, then the extruder is hitting a lot more backpressure. A direct drive allows the printer to somewhat push through and overcome bad hotend designs. At the end of the day, they both do the same job of pushing filament, and if designed for their ecosystem well both will perform their job well. Heck, the Ultimaker line of 3d Printers are all bowden setups and they don't seem to have any issues.
Totally, that is a fact. The quality of components make a huge difference. Not all bowden or dd setups are created equal.
i only searched this, since i only care about the overall asthetics of the printer :)
i think bowden printers sometimes can look ugly in the head area, since the weird wiring...
while the direct drive extruder don't have any ugly wiring at all.
if this is your first printer, let me try and help: it doesn't matter. what matters is that its common enough that you can do basically anything with it down the line. because as you 3D print, you're going to find out certain things matter FOR YOU and certain things don't, and being able to modify your printer to fit what you want it to do is most important. there are a lot of companies out there with tons of aftermarket support. get a printer with good aftermarket and learn what you care about and what you don't, then upgrade accordingly
You're very knowledgeable and I love your simplistic explanations. Please get into every angle of monetization. I truly believe 3dp will go to the moon this next two years because good kits are getting under $300.
Thank you very much. I have some additional ideas and sponsorships I would like to work on so that I can dedicate more time to creating content and experimenting. I appreciate it and agree that 3dp is only getting cheaper and better.
Converted my ender 3 a month ago to DD. One thing I noticed is it was much easier to dial in linear advance
Awesome! What DD did you go with?
@@ModBotArmy the original extruder but with a 5€ conversion kit from Aliexpress and it works great. I think you could make a similar video for bowden type hotend vs all metal. For me the Ender 3 has been my introduction in 3D printing and I learned a lot. But sometimes I ask myself the question if it wasn't better to just spend the extra cash on a Prusa instead of a cheap Ender 3 where all the cheap upgrades together make a substantial amount. Probably a good topic for a video ;-): Can you transform the Ender 3 an all-round workhorse: direct drive, abl, flex steel sheet, all metal hotend to print at high temps, good quality prints and still be cheaper than a Prusa i3 mk3s
I think (but havent measured!) that the extra weight of a direct drive extruder rarely matters. 3D Printer frames are fairly stiff nowadays and in most cases the maximum acceleration you can get will be limited by the Y axis anyways. Bedslingers need to move the heavy bed and CoreXYs the heavier gantry.
Especially for larger CoreXY style printers a bowden tube is a pain due to needed length. You either get a lot of strining even with PLA or you need to retract a lot of distance. Not only does that slow down the print a lot but can also cayse a lot of extruder grinding on the same filament position leading to feed issues.
Just switched my CR-10 over to a direct drive, I like it, but I've found it's WAY more sensitive to bed levelling issues. If the bed isn't perfectly level, the first 5 or so layers come out wobbly.
Interesting that is not something I have noticed before on my machines. I dont see why that would be the case. I would check to make sure your z axis isnt having issues. I have an Ender 3 right now and it is stock but the Z motor seems to be binding on the first few layers so they turn out rough.
@@ModBotArmy hmmm that's good to know. it's a fairly well used CR-10 thats now going on a year old. auto bed leveling seems to work fine, and worked fine with the bowden setup right before switching, but the extra weight could be making the difference. thanks for the info!
One thing I would do is take the fan cover off and check to make sure the screws holding the hot end against the back plater tight. I bought a direct drive extruder from Creality and that was what had happened to mine. Now it prints perfectly. Or at least as perfectly as a noob with less than 5 months experience can make print. I have both of my Ender 3 printers tuned well enough so I can print the Maker's Muse tolerance test so that all five of the dials turn at .10 layer height.
@@KLP99 hmm interesting thought. I seem to have solved the problem with a textured PEI plate as opposed to a matte one, but I will definitely check those screws.
@@bepstein111
I decided to get the Creality glass covers. They are awesome. I also use either Magigoo or Layerneer. The more I use the latter the better I like it.
I have a BIQU BX Printer which comes with the BIQU H2 Direct Drive Extruder. This DD Extruder only weights 209g. This Printer is a workhorse!!! The H2 is lightweight and one of the best Direct Drives i ever had.
I am jealous! I have the B1 and love it and have the H2 which I plan on installing but I would love to try a BX out of the box to see what it is all about. Did you back it on Kickstarter?
@@ModBotArmy no, i am working for a big online retailer and the BX was given to me for testing. In my opinion the BX is one of the best printers out of the box. I use the printer every day since 1 month and it works like a charm.
I just added a belt driven dual Z-axis drive system and the additional weight of the direct drive is no problem.
What printer did you convert to belt z axis?
I've never had my Bowden tube pop from a push-fitting but I didn't use them for long. Push-fittings fittings had too much play for my taste, even with retainers, so I didn't use them long. I switched to conventional compression fittings and never went back.
Kinda agree with everything you said. I bought the direct drive upgrade direct from creality for my e3 and it's not bad.
Sweet! Have you done any flexible printing on the DD?
@@ModBotArmy yes, but only on the direct drive and had no problems. But it wasn't ninja flex soft.
I don’t understand how the direct drive can be better in the retraction area. If the extruder is retracting the filament a half an inch, it would be the same half inch regardless if the motor driving the gears is 3 inches from the hit end, or 12. They’re both still pulling the filament from the same spot, just one set up has 12 inches of filament in front of it, and the other has 3. I guess the argument can be that it’s easier to push 3 inches of a material than 12 inches of a material, but we’re talking about an extremely lite weight material.
I'm waiting for the orbiter v2 to come out, then I'll look into getting a direct drive
I have a question about printing speeds. Should the first layer be slower than the other remaining layers of a print?
As far as I know, do whatever works well. It can help to improve adhesion but in my experience it's a slight effect but that could just be me. I'll use slow perimeters though.
I have an Ender 3 still Bowden, CR-10S Pro with a direct drive Hemera, and a fairly stock CR-X.
How do you like the CR-X? I have had a few people ask me about it and normally I am not a fan of mixing style hotends.
@@ModBotArmy it wastes alot of filament with the purge block, I got it for a commission that never worked out but now I just use it as a single filament printer beacuse I don't like the amount of waste it produces.
I am going to modify my (relatively new) Anet ET4 Pro from bowden type to direct drive, I already printed the part needed. I‘m also printing with low speeds around 50mm/s, so a bigger mass on the x-axis is no big deal, I hope. The idea of using a smaller / thinner stepper motor for the extruder is great, haven‘t thought for that. If the mass has issues on the x-axis, I will try that. My intention is to print more parts with TPU in the next time, so a direct drive is necessary to do so. Thanks for the information given by your video.
I would start with the full size motor like you said and if you run into issues (I doubt you will) try smaller. I think you are going to really like it. What extruder are you going with?
@@ModBotArmy : It‘s the one the Anet was shipped with, I don‘t know its name. But yesterday - when I started with the „project“ - I had to stop it. After disassembling the extruder I found out that the developer of the adapter forgot about the proximity sensor used for bed levelling. It‘s not accessible anymore. So I had to modify the part and print it again, but it‘s now not stable anymore. But I found a new solution idea on YT I want to build after modifying it so that my filament sensor can be also part of the moving head. In this new solution the extruder motor is turned 90 degrees and now oriented along the y-axis. The disadvantage is that now the CoG of the moving head is far away from the rail and that makes me not so happy. The attrition of the wheels will be much higher then. So maybe I come back to the first (modified) solution after I increased the stability. Worst thing is that a print of this adapter lasts more than 7 hours...
Ok, done.
I designed the extended adapter and printed it, I ordered longer cables for extruder and filament sensor (and modified them a bit, the cable length and the pin layout had to be changed), and assembled everything. Took me about 3 hours because I also changed the complete hot end (I was not able to disassemble it without damage, real low quality). Fun fact: Even I changed the hot end, I had not to correct the levelling.
Now it‘s printing the first parts and it looks good. Thank you for encouraging me to change my printer within the warranty time period.
Meanwhile the printer is ready, the result looks good!
Dr. Vax has published a video on a very similar topic pretty recently. He made the point that, in his experience, DD printers are faster than Bowden printers because they don't need to retract the filament as far as Bowden style printers have to and therefore waste less time. As I only have a single printer and it's the Ender 3 Pro both your explanation and his sound reasonable - what do you think about this?
That would be a good experiment. I think the more retractions you have in the gcode, the advantage would go to the direct drive. When I was setting up the CR-6SE for PETG, I had to go over 10mm retraction distance. On my direct drives I am at 0.7 to 0.8. That is a lot of difference, if there are a lot of retractions.
I will have to take a look at that. For retraction heavy prints that could definitely narrow the gap between the two in print times.
I'm having a lot of trouble printing tpu with a bowden printer, as well you have a limit of nozzle sizes. Greg wade's extruder ftw. lol It never fails, it creates so much torque, which simple bowdens never will. I have 4 greg wades, 2 of which drive 1mm printing nozzles. My little bowden unit is cute for small diameters but it has zero overhead. I guess you can actually use a greg wade with bowdens though which might be a fix for my tpu problem.
I've been fighting with my 6' delta to dial in bowden. I'm using duet, PA settings, and bondtech qr extruder, and a mosquito magnum hotend. Due to the size of the delta, the bowden tube is over 500 mm long, and am using a 0.8mm nozzle. No matter how I dial it in and compensate, either blobs occur or it leaves gaps. I finally threw in the towel and am switching to a flying extruder. Bowden works for shorter runs, and smaller nozzles, but a big delta like I'm running, dialing it in is 2 steps forward 1 step back.
Yeah that is tough on a Delta that large. I had a large Delta for a short while that was very tall and I could not get good consistent prints out of it. I hope the swap does the trick for you.
@@ModBotArmy the flying extruder worked perfectly. Absolutely the cleanest prints. No ringing, no blobs, retraction setting is now 1.5mm. Using a bmg with a pancake stepper. Has no problems keeping with a high flow hotend and fast prints. The big heavy bondtech qr will go into the spares bin for a future build.
Thanks! Simple and comprehensive as usual! I'll probably go for direct drive on my next printer just for the sake of experimentation :)
Thanks for watching :) Totally! Having one of each is definitely a win so that you can come to your own conclusions.
I have only had Bowden drives, but I have had issues with the PTFE tubes coming unseated during a print on 2 occasions. Eventually the claws in the grip wear out. I have also had the issue on the hot end where over time a gap opens up between the end of the PTFE tube and the heat brake, and melted filament builds up in there and you end up with under extrusion.
Interesting. I wonder if it is best practice to replace the bowden tube or the ptfe fittings after a certain number of print hours. I feel like it is to difficult to figure out how long or how many hours that is unless someone sets up a test bench just to check that.
Bowden is only faster if you are printing at high speeds. If you are printing for quality, it is definitely slower if you are printing at 60mm/s or slower, as the retraction distance and speed become a significant factor in your overall printing speed. If printing high speed at a reduced quality is what you need (this obviously eliminates flexibles), then Bowden is definitely your best option.
I like the Micro Swiss all metal direct drive extruder as well, as I can easily increase the temperature of the print chamber up to 100°C w/o needing to worry about plastic parts failing. It also places the motor on the back side of the plate, which better balances the weight to each side of the plate. Unfortunately, Micro Swiss told me that they’re too busy to work on modifications for linear rail systems, so I’ll need to grind down the plate that I have, in order to mount it on top of a linear rail.
BTW, while printing with a direct drive extruder, have you also tried different slicers on that same machine? I had been using Cura, as pretty much everyone was using it, and PrusaSlicer wasn’t around. However, I really like the layout of PruscaSlicer better from an engineering standpoint. So, I dialed in settings for both slicers, and I’ve found that not only are the PrusaSlicer prints slightly faster, they don't have the ringing that I see with Cura sliced prints. It’s like PrusaSlicer has some kind a anti-ringing in their slicing.
P.S. In case you don’t recognize me, my other channel is Kaelum. I’m finally getting this new channel setup. 😎
They just released a linear rail version! I am going to be installing it onto a machine in a couple of weeks. If you have not ground down your plate dont haha. I hope that I caught you before.
I am 100% on Cura at the moment as I have been very happy with it for years but I also think the best slicer out there is the one that works for you. I know a lot of people swear by Prusa Slicer. I may have to do some slicing and see which comes out on top. Definitely a lot to consider.
Awesome :) good luck with the new channel
@@ModBotArmy I was going to start tomorrow. Are you talking about their side mounted linear rail, which requires the belt to rotate vertically? The Ender 5 Plus needs the belt to rotate horizontally around the extrusion. If I grind it down, I'll have more than enough room to install an endoscopic camera and additional LED lighting as well.
Once I get Creality to fix the extremely loud squealing of the Z screws, I'm going to rotate the Y-axis belts to be horizontal with dual Y-axis motors, so that the Y-axis belts run horizontally as well. I considered other options, but all of them would have doubled the backlash by doubling the number of pullies on each side of the Y-axis. I'm currently researching 32 bit MBs that support dual Z, dual Y, single X, a single extruder, built-in networking (optional), and full support for OctoPrint.
The nice thing about this design is that the Y-axis will be a dual duplication of the X-axis, so I should be able to use many of the machined parts that Creality is already making. Sort of an Ender 5 Plus v2 design, if you will. :)
I'm pretty sure that Cura and PrusaSlicer will both have the exact same features, and abilities, in the future while offering different methods of working. I was interested in knowing if you had observed the same things. Anywho, for now the channel is just a hobby, but who knows. Thanks for the reply!
Bowden. I have an Ender 5 and Qidi I-Fast. My I-Fast was Direct drive, Speed: 30 mm/s. now with Bowden it have 160 mm/s with better result.
I come from Anet A8 still my only one 3D printing I have only changed the body for a custom aluminum weld by myself and the board cuz it bur out lately and lately I've been starting to se an increment in gosting.
With a large print, the heat of the nozzle has time to travel up the line of the filament itself and since the link with the bowden tube guide is plastic AND the weakest link in the chain, it pops off once it's warm enough. Maybe if the print is 12 horus, they can break up into 6hrs with a rest in between?
What about people who have pet birds that are concerned about PTFE fumes , what is the most PTFE free setup?
if the direct drive has a short PTFE tube and it is going to an all metal hot end does the PTFE tube still heat up at all?
you said some have no PTFE tube at all , is there a kit that includes a direct drive and all metal hot end for the ender 3/ pro with no PTFE?
The heat should dissipate before it reaches the PTFE tube and cause it to decompose IF you have an all metal hotend that is. If you want to go an extra step to prevent any chance of fumes coming from PTFE I’d suggest an enclosure with good sealing and air filtration (which can give you the added bonus of being able to print with ABS if you ever wanted to )
I have a MicroSwiss full kit on my ender 3 pro and haven't looked back haha the speeds and clean prints I have gotten blows the ender 3 pro stock out of the water , debating about making my chiron direct drive
I find my results worsened once I switched to the MS kit. I've set my E-steps to 142.9 and retraction to 1 mm at 35 mm/s, printing at 40mm/s. Mind sharing your settings?
Yeah I love mine as well. I have a temporary stock Ender 3 and it is not nearly as enjoyable to use as the one with the MS DD. I think I may have spoiled myself :p
@@yony120 I don't have any crazy settings especially since instead of setting esteps (I always mess up) I 3d printed a cr6 filament guide just flattened a little and that solved my problems but I run 3.5 mm retraction and I print 50mm typically but for the most it's just stock settings I change settings more so depending on the print 🤫
@@ModBotArmy oh yeah I totally feel you with spoiling yourself haha I have a cr6 that I feel I just wanted money on because I thought oh auto bed leveling will save so much time but I spend more time fixing it then I do anything else plus manual leveling is now so much better when I have experience haha
I have an Ender 5 and was thinking of moving the extruder to the top of the printer and shorting the bowden tube considerably as well as using a capricorn tube as well as adding an EZR extruder. Does this make sense or should I just go with direct drive?
Great info. thanks. Recently bought a Kywoo3d Tycoon which has a direct drive. Works well with pla. With any flexible filament it jambs up on the outlet of the drive gear and pulley wheel… not feeding into hot end thru the ptfe tube that is inside the hot end above the nozzle. tried 240c at 10mm/s and jambs right away. any thoughts?
Great video. Appreciate all the info!
TPU with a direct drive worked. I can't even guess what will happen if try with it with a Bowden tube. I may try it for kicks and jollies.
I am having retraction issues (oozing), tried everything from retraction distance/speed calibrations, PID tunning, replacing nozzle, filament feed tunning, different combing settings, temp calibration... would this something direct drive can help with? I am printing basic Overture PLA.
What about remote direct drive? I haven't heard anything about that in a long while.
Thanks for the video. It sounds like upgrading to Capricorn tubing and a dual gear extruder on a Bowden feed printer would be a good way to go for a first printer. I don't foresee really wanting to print flexible material so the only other upgrade I'd be doing would be an all metal copper hot end since I would like to be able to print nylon and some other higher temp materials.
Yeah if you do not need to print with flexibles honestly a good extruder, capricorn and all metal hotend will let you print with a huge catalog of materials.
I actually have had good luck so far with high speed TPU 95 with my stock (Bowden) extruder setup on my ender 3 pro, just printing at 30mm/s so far though. Bought a dual drive for the stepper and will try to up the speed once I install it. I love the TPU for printing table top minis since they flex rather than snap when they get tossed into a box or fall on the floor.
There is moving table in i3 style printers plus weight of printed detail versus weight of direct drive extruder. Manufacturers like bowden due to they can make $100 printers. It works while customer printing benchies with PLA.
Nice vid.
One remark, though : you shouldn't say "Direct Drive" as an extruder style since it's misleading and a misnomer. "Direct Drive" is a filament drive mechanism, not a filament feed mechanism, since there are 2 direct extruder styles : full direct (motor AND drive gears attached to the X carriage) and remote direct (drive gears attached to the X carriage, motor mounted on the printer frame).
vid starts at 6:25
you're welcome
I swear that when I got my first printer, with a direct drive, everyone was talking about how great the Bowden drives are. And as soon as I got a printer with a Bowden drive, suddenly everyone thinks that direct drive is better. 🙄
same here got a cheap ctc 3d printer after a lot of mods got good prints one of the things was converting to bowden to remove weight from X axis i still use bowden now don't see the point of changing....
Where can i buy the extruder on video?
Great vid as usual. I'm a bowden man but only cuz my ender has one. I am interested in maybe looking at trying a direct drive kit for my ender 3 pro. Also I just had for the first time that dreaded bowden tube pop out from the extruder and a the nest that followed. It was really weird and couldn't figure out the reason. I think it was the tube being too long and cut it down after your vid opening my eyes to the fact that it was too long.
Thank you :D Oh no! I hope I didnt jinx your printer haha. It has happened to me to. The bowden tube can get worn down so cutting it and making sure its firmly pushed in should really help.
Thanks for the video Good Question
Bowden vs Direct drive
I'm Thinking direct drive because I want to Print flexible filaments point 6 or 8 novel
Also This will be my First 3-D printer
So I am looking for 300x300x400 like Sidewinder X1 but the X2 coming out soon
& Atomstack Cambrian 3D printer.
If you know you want to print flexibles I would definitely opt for a DD. You will be happier and have less trouble dialing it in.
Thank you for the video, I am still looking at making a purchase (probably within the next day or two) and I am just trying to see what is available that will not take days to put together and can still be reasonably versatile. Although, if it did not take more than a month to get a prebuilt Prusa i3 mk3s+, I am leaning towards an Ender V2 because of the delivery time. I was concerned about the direct drive verus bowden 3d printer extruder and your video addressed some of my concerns.
Hey Larry! Thanks for watching. The Ender 3 V2 is not a bad machine from everything I have seen. If you do decide down the road you can always upgrade it but for a starter printer there is a lot to learn and it really is a solid option.
@@ModBotArmy Thanks!
for me personally, I started out with a bowden setup, and I'll be honest, its because I didn't do any research. friend said "this is a good brand" and I bought one of their printers, and it worked great for me for a while. then I got into printing more exotic filaments, and I found my setup had problems, especially with filament like TPU. Fortunately my friend had not steered me wrong, because the brand they told me was Creality and the printer I bought was the Ender 3 V2, which has massive aftermarket support, and I upgraded to Direct Drive and an all metal hot end in one go with Microswiss. Ultimately what it came down to for me is that long print times were not as important to me as the end product looking nice, and being able to use the filament I wanted. I'm not saying bowden is bad, But I am saying for those out there that want to be able to print any filament they desire and are okay waiting for their prints to be done, Direct Drive is absolutely the way to go. really, the best advice I have is make sure you can change if you decide your needs change. I kept my bowden extruder, because if in the future my needs change, and I want volume and don't care what filament, I might just change back.
Direct drive for flexibles Bowden for everything else
Why bowden for everything else? Speed?
Im going to direct drive in my Ender 3 pro with a pancake and a bmg, so, no problem if I don’t print more than 60mms? I don’t want lose print quality
I have a Micro Swiss hot end direct drive and it absolutely will NOT print TPU. Do you have some CURA settings that will work?
I’m not doing 3D printing yet but what do you mean by “retraction”? Is that for filament changes or does retraction occur during printing?
Never mind. I RUclipsd “retraction”. 👍🏾👍🏾👍🏾👍🏾👍🏾
I don't understand why if people want direct drive but worry about the added weight why can't you upgrade to a more powerful extruder motor? would that work? or is it the frame that can't handle the weight?
Thanks for this info!
Does Ultimaker have a patent on its design ?. Always been wondering why other brands dont copy this setup. Its really the best.
I've just got into 3d printing with an Ender 3 pro and love that machine. Some random gripe about nomenclature: It does seem like in the 3D printing world, these terms have become standard, but it's weird to me to call the filament feed servo the "extruder" while what I would actually call the extruder is called the "hot end" If anything is to be called an extruder, shouldn't it be the nozzle? (since it's doing the extruding)
Yeah that confused me too at first. I figured that the extruder was the nozzle and all that and that the extruder was just a feeder 😂
For bed slingers, the bed is heavier probably so direct drive weight not really an issue.
Omg I needed this so much.. Let me watch!!!
Haha Awesome :)
why not have both, strong servo on the bowden side with a small server direct drive to aid with retractions?
Great video! I would really like to see a review about the biqu H2 you show. Is there something in planing?
Thanks Jonas! And definitely an install/overview/print quality. I am pretty backed up on videos doing one a week so it may be quite a bit but absolutely.
Good perspective.
Thank you!
nice explanation, thanks!