Extruder upgrade

As you might have noticed, or tried, it’s impossible to print Ninjaflex with the original extruder, the filament will just roll on the wheel as soon as a little pressure is added, when the filament hits the nozzle!

And you surely had issues with the filament runout sensor as well… Unreliable uh?

Well, give a shot at this extruder I made and use now since about a month, without any false filament runout detection and printing tons of Ninjaflex with high quality results!

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3440278

1 Like

Looks very nice.
I guessed that elastic filments would have problems with the stock extruder but I have yet to print with one. As to the runout detection I had to tweak mine to not trigger with slightly thinner filament and now it works ok.

@Psycho
I have some questions to your design:

  • Why you mount the stepper not directly as in the stock K8800?
  • You are reusing the gear and bearings?
  • Why not just using a Bondtech BMG dual drive (or cloned one)?
  • Because I hate the fact that to switch the extruder or anything to do with it you take everything down. As well as the tension applied to the one screw that goes through the lever
  • Yes, it reuses the gear and the bearing
  • Because I wanted to reuse the available material but upgrade it for NinjaFlex and for a better end filament. Besides, bondtech extruders are 150 bucks worth in CH. My design does extrude TPU very nicely and costs me… Mmmmh, maybe 4 bucks in printing