Ender 3 Extruder Problems

A couple of weeks ago I noticed some inconsistent print quality. I found the cause was a worn bushing in the tension arm on my Ender 3. The material was hanging up on the sharp edges of the bushing causing inconsistent feeding.

So, I found this replacement kit on Amazon and thought it looked like an improvement over the stock hardware.

After getting it installed I found the drive gear wanted to slip…a lot. Causing poor printing. It was a slightly different condition than the original problem. I tinkered with it for a while and continued getting poor print results.

I am going to try this dual drive hardware. Has anyone else used this…or one like it?

Yeah, we swapped the extruder on the CR-10S at the makerspace with a set of Bondtech drive gears in a 3D printed housing. Basically we just chopped the extruder portion off the Prusa hotend setup and made a few modifications to get it to mount properly. Definitely works a lot better than the original extruder that wore out.

We originally used a set of non-Bondtech drive gears that were cheaper, but they started wearing out pretty quickly.

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Just an observation the setscrew is not lined up with the flatspot on the shaft in the 2nd photo

Also I had bought one like this of Amazon too be sure that the lever is not hitting the screw that holds it to the stepper motor I think I remember it being a different screw for that reason

There are two set screws on that gear. One of them is on the flat of the motor shaft. And yes, I am using the countersunk bolt under the tension arm.

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Hey Sean!

Did you get this figured out?
How tight is your tension screw? They do require a decent amount of tension, it could also be a clog or something else in your hotend.

If you’d like we could meet up at MakeICT and see if we can’t troubleshoot it! I’m always down for a printer day!

Yeah! The new extruder is working great. I think I may have the calibration off just a bit…but it’s so much better than before. And I printed some TPU last week; which went much better than expected.

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