In this video I’m going to show you how I fitted this thing, onto this thing.
Not too long ago when I was doing my 10 days 10 tips videos, go watch them if you haven’t,
around day 4 I think it was, my extruder gave in. This is a very very common problem on the
ender 3 printer, in fact on any of the creality 3d printers that have this model of plastic extruder.
In fact, this isn’t the first time I have had to deal with poor extruder durability,
here’s my monoprice mini delta with a replacement piece on the outlet
end of the extruder, this happened to both my mini deltas.
You can actually print out the arm for this fix too and I might give it a go at some point to
see how durable that fix is, but you can also buy them, this one I have here bought ages
ago in anticipation of at least one of my enders breaking, this cost me about £3.50 I think, around
five dollars, it’s worth having a spare around assuming you don’t fit a metal kit like this,
and I have mixed feelings about these kits because there can be some really poor quality ones.
But, all that said, I polled you guys at the time and you told me you’d rather see me make
a video on upgrading this machine to a direct drive. Yes, that means
none of these parts are going to be used, at the moment at least. So let's do that instead.
This is the kit you receive from Creality. I bought it from bangood - £28.05. And this is what
we call here a cracking price, because it includes an entire hotend assembly, an entire extruder
assembly - sadly still plastic but whatever, and the frame and wheels, and all the wiring.
Of course this means that this is a REALLY cheap way to get a direct drive printer.
I paid £110 for my ender 3 in a random sale on box.co.uk, so
this means I’ve paid a total of £140 or around 185 dollars for all of this, plus I guess about
15 pounds for the magnetic bed I’m using. I’m not sure if you can get DD printers for that kind
of money but I doubt you can get any that are as reliable - I know, you may disagree, but remember
these are hugely popular and while they may break in specific ways they are absolute workhorses.
So - you also get a couple of tools in here, the spanner is useful so keep that,
for the rest it’s better to have your own screwdriver set with mainly hexagonal bits.
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a manual but it’s of minimal
use really, especially since I don’t even have this board.
so First up is to remove the screws, noting that there’s a long one at the back and two
at the front. This is obviously for the standard ender 3, the v2
should support this mod but the board is in a different place underneath.
My ender came with a 32 bit board which in reality is not an upgrade over the 8 bit
because it’s still got noisy drivers on it, and the stock firmware
doesn’t add any functionality - in fact it takes it away, the stock ender3 and
v2 firmware for 32bit boards ignores filament change commands, which is...useful. But more on
that later because I have a silent board ready to fit in an upcoming video which will be fun.
The general idea with fitting this mod is to remove the current hotend assembly from the bar,
and remove the corresponding wires from it, and replace them with the new wires.
While this sounds like a nightmare, it’s actually not that bad because
this is all one wiring loom and it’s separate from the ones for the heated bed and servos.
You should probably be aware that the plugs are hot melt glued in,
which is a bit of a pain, but you can remove them with a flat blade screwdriver.
Removing a few plugs from the board and moving the wires gives you some space to work in,
and then using the manual sheet thing you can work out which plugs and cables
to remove and remove them. There are a couple of troublesome zip ties involved and you have
to be super careful not to accidentally cut open the wire insulation like I did.
The next logical step would be to take this cable out completely which I am not doing as I may want
to undo this mod, so I’ve just tucked it out of the way. What would be needed is removing the
horrible black tape that they have put on to the cable where it enters the casing which I assume
is some kind of wear protection, removing the cable and presumably putting new tape on. Because
I am soon to be installing a silent board though, I’m leaving all this in place for now, which you
can also do if you think you might want to swap back, or even if you’re just a bit lazy.
I’m going to show you something important here which I may make a full video about because
it really is a big thing you need to know but I don’t think it’s widely known. The wires that
these printers come with are what’s known as “tinned” meaning they have put solder on the
end to kind of hold the stranded wire together. This is fine in most hobby electronics situations,
but for the hotend wiring and especially the heated bed wires,
it is apparently absolutely not OK. I have seen multiple reports of incidents where
through presumably thermal expansion and wires getting loose or maybe some other mechanism,
you end up with burned connectors where they screw into the terminals.
The solution is to use one of these.
The tool is a crimp tool and it’s made specifically for these kinds of ferrules,
these literally just go over the wires and crimp on. Importantly I am not an electrician and I am
probably not doing this optimally so please do not follow my advice on HOW to do this,
instead I will link below to some actual electricians who will show you how to do it.
It goes without saying that doing this wrong could also cause a dangerous electrical fault,
especially on the heated bed wires as there’s around 10 amps in those wires which is
capable of fairly catastrophic failure. I don’t want to scare you into thinking
this failure is common, I haven’t seen it on any of my printers, but you should definitely
be aware that if you ever get a weird smell from the printer, it’s time to check for this problem.
Back to the modification, with everything in place, it’s just a case of routing the wires
sensibly which you could probably spend more time on than I did, it’s quite hard with the
cameras in the way, and I know I’m ripping all this out in a couple weeks to do the
silent board mod. Remember to plug the fan back in and the screen and then put the case back on.
The next bit, well there’s two ways to do this. You need to get the print head off the rail, and
even after removing the tensioner and the belt you will find it still hits the bar behind.
I found it relatively easy, if annoying, to remove the two screws behind the triangular piece
and then just move the bar up a bit to free the triangular part. This allows you
to roll the old head off and put the new one on. I understand that you can also loosen the lower
pulley wheel to achieve the same effect. Which you do is up to you.
Tightening up the belt is even more important than before due to the extra weight on this assembly,
and make sure your belt isn’t touching the sharp part of the
aluminium profile. I find that tilting the tensioner down a bit achieves this.
You almost certainly will need to adjust the eccentric wheel on the new hotend assembly,
it’s underneath and you can use the spanner provided. You’re looking to remove any wobble
at all, while also you don’t want to feel any “bumps” as you move along the x axis,
any bump sensations mean you have the wheels set too tight and this
will cause premature wear, and believe it or not, you even get marks on your print.
obviously now the extruder is going to be moving around with the hotend,
the filament path is totally different. The simple fix seems to be to turn the
filament reel holder 180 degrees and center it, a pretty obvious fix that appears to work.
If your filament is kept off to the side of the printer then...good luck with that.
With all that done, I fired up the printer, tested
each axis using the menus, and heated up the hotend, and all was working.
But we’ve forgotten one thing. I almost sent a test print at this point,
but managed to cancel at last minute. What have we forgotten?
Of course, to re-level the bed. This is an entirely new assembly so the chance
of the nozzle being in the same place is nearly zero. The chance
of breaking something by forgetting to level the bed is definitely non zero.
Bed levelled, I did a test print of the train here.
It came out really well and I’m very pleased with the results.
I also wanted to check for any artifacts due to the extra weight,
so I tried the aperture science weighted companion cube which should show any serious issues up in
the same way a calibration cube would. All was well except from some missing bits,
if you can see here on the close up. This worried me, I mean this could be temperature
or underextrusion due to something like poor esteps calibration - esteps calibration being
the ratio the extruder has to move compared to how much filament you want to extrude.
So - let’s sum up! Would I recommend you perform this upgrade?
Actually sure, why not. It would have taken me about an hour if I wasn’t filming it, so
it’s a pretty quick process. It doesn’t contain any steps that are particularly difficult,
in fact chances are you already built the printer once so it’s no harder than that. The only tips
I have are about the wiring and making sure everything is calibrated properly, the whole
thing comes pre-assembled and the esteps seem to be the same so it’s really well thought out.
I know you will all want to know how this thing works with TPU. That,
is for next time. Well, probably the time after next I think, because I’ve got a two colour
geeetech printer in the hall waiting for me to build it, and I can’t wait. Which reminds me,
if anyone knows or has tips on how you create two colour gcode from presumably two colour
stl or 3mf files then I would like to talk to you because this is uncharted territory for me!
As usual, any comments or questions please put them below. I have a few announcements to make
when I can figure out what to say or how, but it’s just about things I want to do / am doing
and the future of the channel. For now, I will mention that I have started a patreon so that’s
linked below, and I have created a discord, the intention here is so that we can share
pictures and more information than is possible in the comments,
but I’m not sure if it will be of any use, but I’ll give it a go anyway, that’s also below.
I will see you next time!
Thank you for watching