Creality CR 10S Micro Swiss Direct Drive Extruder Upgrade

i've decided to do some upgrades to my creality cr-10s welcome to hackaweek [Music] i love this printer straight up first let me say that as it sets great printer it's been nothing but awesome it's real easy to work with i usually get the bed level dialed in and i do two dozen prints flawlessly it's great hats off to creality for making a really awesome product uh as things are wearing a little bit i'm noticing a couple of things going on with some of my prints um lumps and bumps things being a little offset on the z-axis it staggers around a bit there's some unevenness not sure if it's a slicer issue or if it's the printer but at any rate the cr-10s uses a bowden tube feed system for the filament that's kind of good in a sense that you don't have a lot of mass moving back and forth across here shaking things out of alignment but if you print slow you can negate quite a bit of that i suppose with you know inertia and all that i digress anyway i picked up a direct drive kit that should just go directly on here there's a little extension cable it looks like it's a pretty straightforward install it was a hundred bucks so let's check it out the from the factory setup is with a bowden tube and then the stepper motor over here is what feeds the filament so what we're doing is moving this stepper motor over to here along with some of the components from here like the hot end etc and it's all gonna then mount on here and move back and forth this will be eliminated i will have a section of bowden tube maybe about that long between the dual drive gears that will be pushing filament through the hot end first thing we need to do is print a benchy so i did i printed one as the printer sets now we'll print one later and compare the two i don't think i'm going to see huge huge differences but just want to try out this product see how it works so it's not a bad looking benchy there pretty decent um not a bad print at all we'll see how it looks after the uh the change you can see some of the lumpy bumpies that i'm talking about let's see if i can point them out right there right there there there it gets just right see the little shadows those lumpy bumpies they randomly show up we'll see if it's related to mechanical or is it slicer because i've had it happen in a couple of different slicers so anyway let's take a look at that package so i just bought this this is not paid advertising or anything just uh decided to check out a direct drive for the cr-10s this popped up looked good from swiss and made in made in usa says well i was going to say probably made in china but this is the thing that was attractive it's the dual gear setup so one of these gears is driven by the stepper motor and there's spring tension on the other one and so not only is it an idler gear it's coupled to the drive mechanism of the first gear so they stay in sync on each side technically you'd never have any slippage once you get the spring tension set right let's open this up and see what's inside of course a qr code or just type that in with the keyboard goodies oh these are beautifully machined parts i gotta say pretty freaking awesome so i'm not big on unboxings like one thing at a time you think is that it is it empty yes all right now let's just kind of lay it out here real quick and then what i'm gonna do is kind of jump online look for a tutorial i know there's one out there somewhere i'm not about to do a tutorial i'm about to just kind of record me putting this on my printer printing another benchy and see how it performs just realized i had to heat the hot end up so i could retract the filament before i go any further having some trouble removing the bowden tube it's just not releasing from the hot end hot end's hot too by the way but still not wanting to come loose so anyway cutting it doesn't matter onto the stepper motor okay bye-bye [Music] and gear removal all this bye-bye new hardware [Music] stepper motor three screws provided in the package i'm gonna put one here here and here not there we're going to leave that one blank there's three holes that are countersunk pretty self-explanatory where they go this is the tension lever and where the other gear resides and the machining on this stuff is just the bomb so nicely done stepper motor gear shove a piece of filament in there i'm thinking move it back and forth a few times let that find where it wants to be and then tighten it up oh yes and do make sure that you line up your set screw with the flat side of the shaft of the stepper motor thank you very much we got this unbelievably beautiful machined tension adjustment screw it's flat on here where it goes through that section so it can't twist and then it has a thumb nut and they say the best place to start is with the stud flush with the thumb nut that's our starting point my goodness the machine work well done well done yes bit of a hot end assembly now the titanium thermal break awesome nice little hunk of titanium we're just gonna flip this over and put the nozzle in point four millimeter okay and now we can get the heater block assembly on look at that looks like a little motorcycle engine small piece of tubing needs to be inserted into here with the bevel see this bevel there's a bevel it's pointy that needs to be facing up and as if it was going to nestle in between two gears which is what it's going to do all right that tube is going to go right up through here easier said than dead until it butts up against everything right there and assume that that's the length it's supposed to be yep there it is they line right up nicely mounted we need to disconnect the old hot end okay let's get the temperature sensor hooked up and the hot end installed damn did that just break temperature sensor would be ouch that puts a little damper on things yeah that little sensor is gone broken gotta find a new one okay so on hold till i get one of those however we can continue and move the project forward because there's still things to do i forgot also i have this nice silicone sleeve that goes over the hot end tell you what we can also do to move the project forward we can install our new filament guide over here this one's going to be good fun so here's a pretty cool part here's the adapter for what used to be the feed motor now that feed motor is mounted down here so we have a plug that is an extension plug that i can wire tie right there now we can install the bowden tube that goes from here to here nothing's pushing over here this is just a feed tube it's just to guide it to the hot end so what i need to do is insert this far enough where it's past this slot because then there's a e-clip e-clip that goes on there and holds it in place okay it looks like that's down far enough let's see if we can get this e-clip to cooperate i already lost it [Applause] e-clips are great but i gotta buy the tool there's a tool ah my mechanic my lead mechanic at my shop it has the tool it's awesome it holds it for you ninjas that sucker right in there cabling so now that we have that bowden tube there as an anchor point you can actually do some nice cable routing here so here we are a few days later i've got a thermistor uh installed in here and we're ready to continue with putting all of this together so we've got to get got to get the hot end installed and the thermistor installed i'm gonna tackle that thermistor first that's pesky right so we're gonna get this thermistor into this tiny hole in the aluminum okay that looks good and now we're gonna tighten that screw up just enough to hold the wires and the thermistor in place okay now we're putting up the two allen screws that hold in the heater it's a bit tight with the wiring and the fan here but i think we're gonna make it also rather tricky to get this allen bolt started ah there we go one more time with the wire ties give myself a little slack there down here about like that all right so this is what's up next we got to do a little changing little calibration stuff like that in the uh starting g code we need to replace all of what is there on the printer settings with this bit of code so i'm going to go ahead and select all of this and copy it next up extruder steps need to be calibrated 130 steps per millimeter all right i'm using marlin 1.1.7 so we're going to go to control oops yeah there we go motion and steps and e steps oops i went to z i want to get out of there easy steps did it again i hate that knob thing i hate it there we go let's go 130 was that what it was all right i'm using marlin 1.1.7 so we're going to go to control oops yeah there we go motion and steps and e steps oops i went z i want to get out of there easy steps did it again i hate that knob thing i hate it there we go let's go 1 30 was that what it was [Music] so 1 30. 130. done i suppose i could manually lower the z and just double check that the end stop switch is gonna do its thing before something crashes into the bed but it looks like it was engineered to be an exact [Music] yeah it's just a little below that actually right now glad i checked that click click okay there we go i like that i can adjust the rest now with a bed leveling routine all right let's load up some filament and try printing a benchy everything's up to temp let's do a little extrusion and see what we get 36 millimeters let's watch for the group to come out of this nozzle we go it's cooling a little now so my method of choice been working for me great for years with abs and other things mostly yes good old aqua net extra super hold cheap hairspray okay let's get something printing here from the sd card benchy like a good first layer now then chief then she's done break them off let's peel away all that bottom stuff and we'll compare them to the one from the other extruder there we go the one on the left is with the bowden tube the other one is with the new direct drive the real tail is going to be the lumpy bumpies you can see them on the hull there little zits i was getting all kinds of zits am i still getting the zits um there's less zits that's good news there's a few less zits on that hole than on this one we'll see yeah i'll get playing with it and see what's up as far as stuff up on the wheelhouse let's take a look at that this is bowdoin tube print this is direct drive print is there any huge difference really that you can see i don't know anyway time will tell we'll do some prints and see what really happens with this thing let's take a look at a v2 nose cone that i did it's got these little bumps inside on the bayonet connectors and a hole appeared i think that might have to do with the retraction which i did not have set on this file to what they recommend i have retraction big time on the file that printed this other than that there's the z scene hello i can live with that that's not bad i can sand that out real easy this is what i was getting before it got this bad that the z seam it was just getting worse and worse so very odd i don't know could have had to do with the feed possibly maybe had something to do maybe it had something it had something but anyway this looks very nice and i want to print more and get that retraction dialed down a little and see what we get well it's happily printing away and making much better looking plants definitely a lot better one more time on this nose cone section how smooth it is it's a beautiful thing of course the z seam is in you know a couple of places staggered but easily sandable but no more pimples and zits and yuck beautiful all right well worth it so i say yes to the micro swiss direct drive extruder for the cr-10s well worth the hundred bucks um it's doing such a great job i mean i can't deny it it's awesome it just seems to make a little more sense it's direct drive less play the bowdoin tube's got its pluses and minuses but there's a lot of slack in that too but i think over time that's kind of what added up to all the mess i had going on because it's working great now so i'm sold so if you get one of these let me know how it works out in the comments below um i'll put a link down there to where you can get one i got this one on amazon so there we go i guess that's about a wrap on this one then i've got a printer that's printed much better now for a hundred dollar more investment and i'm happy until next time you

Channel: HackaweekTV

Views: 1,300

Keywords: diy, hardware hacking, mechanical, 3d printer mods, 3d printer upgrades, 3d printer upgrade, cr-10s upgrade, micro-swiss, direct drive extruder, bowden tube

Id: -T0T3VGodYU

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021