Faster 3d Printers, Bowden vs Direct Extruder, Creality Ender 3 v2 vs Ender 5

hi this is irv shapiro with the make with tech youtube channel formerly the dr vaxx youtube channel and today i'm surrounded by printers and the reason is we're going to talk about 3d printer speed specifically a couple characteristics that impact speed this is an ender 3 version 2. it's stock except for i've added a bl touch sensor to it and upgraded the marlin 2.0 firmware to support it this is an ender 5. originally the center 5 was extensively updated with a variety of components that we'll talk about in a couple moments but most importantly now i've recently updated it with a micro swiss direct extruder with an all metal hot end and we're going to look at which one of these printers is faster and which of the upgrades which of the components influence that speed so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] well folks i'm a lucky guy as a reviewer on youtube i have a whole bunch of 3d printers the majority of them these two as an example i paid for myself others sometimes manufacturers send to me in order to do a review and sometimes components are added in order to do a review today we're going to look at an upgrade to my ender 5 from microswiss that i paid for i have no connection to micro swiss and we're going to compare this bowden style ender 3 printer with this now direct drive ender 5 printer and we're going to look at the speed of printing a couple different types of prints but one in particular these prints are designed to hold a watch on your nightstand on your bookcase in my case i have a variety of watches this happens to be an apple watch but i have a variety of watches from citizen that are charged via light and so i like to stick them in a window every once in a while so they get a lot of sunlight now i'll tell you if i was to look at these two prints not knowing anything about this video i couldn't tell the difference but this one printed 40 percent faster than this one and that's what we're going to discuss today let's start by looking at architecture of the 3d printers that i own the fastest two that i've owned historically are my prusa i3 mk3 which is the first 3d printer i ever purchased and my monoprice ultimate 2. so what are the characteristics in common between those two very different printers the first is they both are direct extruder printers direct drive extruder printers could be the whole difference we'll determine whether it is the second is they both have very rigid frame if we compare the frame on this ender 3 to this ender 5 the ender 3 frame does the job but because there are single vertical columns here extrusions here it could twist a little bit it could vibrate a little bit in the case of the ender 5 it's a complete box that's going to minimize any vibration of the frame the other very interesting difference between these two printers is on the ender 3 the print bed moves back and forth so in order to print at a different y location remember we have x y and z in order to print a different y location you have to move the print bed and you know what you do that a really lot so that print bed is vibrating a lot that means that it puts vibrations on the frame the frame starts to vibrate that impacts quality so what do you do to get great quality on a printer with this structure you slow it down now let's look at the under five for a minute the ender five the print bed only moves up and down up and down and when do you move the print bed up and down when you switch layers now you may also move it up and down slightly if you're using z-hop a lot but if you're not using z-hop then most of the movement is switching layers so the number of moves required by this print bed are smaller than the number of moves here this is shaking back and forth this if you watch it is gently going up maybe every once while going up and down a bit so overall the design of this printer would make it seem more stable how does that compare to the monoprice ultimate 2 and the pruso which are my fastest printers well the prusa has a frame that has this single shape but it's made of a different material it also has dual z axes so dual rods it has multiple rods going along the x axis and so overall it's more rigid quite a bit more rigid so it has direct extruders they both have direct extruders they're both more rigid why is the ultimate two more rigid well it's a fully enclosed printer it looks like a box fully enclosed the other thing that's different is both of those printers have auto bed leveling why would that impact speed well we're not going to test it today but i believe that i'm able to print faster on printers with auto bed leveling because i get a bit better bed adhesion that's not to say you can't get great bed adhesion without auto bed leveling you absolutely can you just have to maybe fine tune your bed leveling manually more often with those characteristics in mind let's focus on this ender 5 for a minute and you can see here on the slide this is no longer a stock ender 5. in fact the only thing that stock are the power supplies the frames the stepper motors everything else has really been changed i replaced the creality control board with the th 3d easy board that's a 32-bit control board running marlin 2. i added an easy abl sensor that's this sensor here it's a capacitive auto bed leveling sensor i had already put in a micro swiss hot end not an extruder but just the hot end that's an all metal hot end we'll look at that in a moment i use capricorn tubing that's unimportant now because this tube is no longer a bowden tube the filaments pulled through by the gears right here we'll look at a close-up of that in a minute so all this tube is doing is it's a guide so the filament doesn't flop around but when it was a traditional bowden extruder that capricorn tubing which is more precise made a difference and probably the most important upgrade i made on this printer before changing to a direct extruder is i installed a simi cnc easy struder that's an extruder for a bowden style printer i think it's the best bowden style extruder available if it fits on your printer now the easy extruder i replaced with this direct extruder the capricorn tubing doesn't really matter anymore because of this wonderful micro swiss direct extruder now why do i think it's a wonderful direct extruder let's look at some pictures first on the bottom right you'll see that it uses dual gears there are two sets of inner meshed gears and it pulls the filament between those gears those gears have aggressive teeth on them that lock the two gears together and really well calibrated teeth that pull the filament through the middle the other thing i really like about this architecture is most direct extruders and i'll show you some pictures here look like boxes they're fully enclosed you can't see what's going on inside that means if your filament jams if something goes wrong they're really hard to maintain and work on look at this micro swiss direct extruder you see everything's out in the open if that filament jams it's going to be trivial to fix it and that makes this a easier direct extruder to use and eliminates one of my complaints about direct extruders that they're hard to maintain now let's look overall at the difference between a bowden and a direct extruder architecture on the left in this picture we have a bowden style extruder the filament comes off the reel there's a geared system mounted somewhere on the printer generally on the frame and you can see that right here in this particular printer that extruder has a series of gears it could be dual geared it could be single gears that pushes the filament through a tube in this case this white tube here is the bowden tube and that tube is flexible so the filament is being pushed from here it has to be pushed all the way to the hot end now that means the precision that can be applied to extrusion will be dependent on a lot of things one is how precisely this tube is manufactured if there's more space between the tube and the filament the filament is going to flop around a little bit that's going to impact your extrusion if there's not enough space it's going to drag that's going to impact your extrusion that's why i use capricorn tubing very often haven't upgraded this printer yet on my bowden style printers because the tolerances are tighter now on the direct extruder side you'll see that the filament is pulled off a reel it goes to an extruder we can see that right here it goes to an extruder that's right on top of the hot end that means that there's very little slop in the system the advantages that are better extruder consistency and the ability to use a wider range of filaments flexible filaments that flop around a lot are problematic in bowdoin style systems you can print them and when this ender five had the easy extruder on it uh the simi cnc easy struter i used it a lot with flexible filaments but in general direct extruder implementations are better with flexible filaments now let's look at the other thing i upgraded which i don't think is impacting speed but is a nice upgrade on the left hand side you'll see a creality style hot end the ptfe tubing the bowden tube or the capricorn bowden tube in this case is pushed all the way through to the nozzle the advantage of that is there's nothing inside that nozzle for the filament to catch on the disadvantage of that is ptfe tubing begins to release gases they're not necessarily good for you at about i don't know 230 degrees celsius maybe a little bit higher depending on the tubing capricorn tubing can go a little higher than the regular white style tubing in most cases in all metal hot ends the tubing doesn't go into the hot end it stops at the top of the hot end on the cool side of the hot end the disadvantage is you have a little bit of a lip in essence between your tubing and the hot end and depending on how the hot end is manufactured there could be other seams in there the advantage is you can run in your hot end safely at much much higher temperatures so this ender 5 now has direct extrusion and all metal hot end and in fact instead of a brass nozzle it has a hardened steel nozzle so i can print abrasive materials that require high temperatures on this printer now let's look at some results and see how this impacts performance so here's a graph of the various print runs that i performed you'll see the stock ender 3 style printer printed this print in about 153 minutes now my profiles can make a big difference so what profiles did i use i did all the slicing for these prints using cura 4.11 let me tell you something about cura and creality printers when cura released i believe it was version 4.0 they included a whole new set of profiles for creality printers with the slicer those profiles were crowdsourced that means many people participated in the designs there were lots of discussions they're highly optimized prior to cura version 4 most people for creality printers used a custom profile they got from someone for me at least as of version 4 the profiles that chip with cura are really good and i might tune temperatures a little bit and retraction a little bit depending on the filament brand i'm using but in general i use the stock profiles so to make this test fair i used the stock ender 3 profile and i used the stock ender 5 profile the only change i made was to add a g29 to each of the start codes so the auto bed leveling would run before the prints before i look at cura print times how do i know they're accurate well because i did a test i printed this on the original ender 5 with the standard bowden setup and cura estimated to take about two hours and three or four minutes to print actual print time was two hours and one minute so i knew i could more or less trust the cura times to get me in the right ballpark for these estimates so the first print took 153 minutes the fastest print took 93 minutes which is a 40 percent improvement in speed that's really a big deal you'll see in this graph that going from the ender 3 to the ender 5 with an original bowden setup the speed improved pretty dramatically what's that all about well let's start by looking at that on the right you see the cura profile for the ender 5. on the left you see the cure profile for the ender 3. the key factor here is the default speed the default print speed for the ender 3 is set at 50 millimeters per second for the ender 5 it's set at 80. why once again look at the physical construction this thing is a box and the print bed doesn't have to shake it moves up slowly so just by having a different architecture even with a bowden setup you get good speed on the ender 5. the disadvantage of the ender 5 is when it's set up as a bowden printer the bowden tube is much longer than on the ender three that means you potentially need more retraction which might offset your better print speed but just by going from a more flexible frame and a print bed that moves back and forth to a rigid frame and a print bed that only go moves up we were able to increase speed now moving to direct extruder make as much difference as i thought it would make and let's look at why you'll see that with this model retraction takes about 13 of the print time and going from five millimeters of retraction at 45 millimeters per second to 1.5 millimeters of retraction at 35 millimeters per second only shaved about one percent off the print time so for this print the advantage of direct extrusion for retraction doesn't really make a difference now let's look at a different print i printed this as an example of a print that has an enormous amount of retraction now i'll tell you the print quality of this print is just okay and one of the problems with this print is i think the level of detail in this print how fine these individual lines are is pushing the boundaries of a 0.4 millimeter nozzle so i think i need to either scale this print up or print it with a finer nozzle if i'm going to print it in this size but it was a good test to look at times retraction on this print is 42 percent therefore going from a bowden style to a direct extruder makes much more difference because we went from 42 percent of the print time to 33 percent of the print type now if we go back to our graph we'll see that by increasing the print speed from 80 millimeters per second to 150 millimeters per second i pretty dramatically reduce the print time well the question is when you do that will quality suffer not a bit why is that and what does that have to do with the direct extruder well if we look at these pictures of this direct extruder once again the gearing is dual gears that are locked in a mesh and it grips the filament very firmly that gives us the ability to push the filament through at a much higher speed without slippage when you have a single gear and an idler wheel it's much easier for there to be slippage in the system with dual gears there's less slippage and therefore i can drive the printer at a much higher speed and still get good quality you'll note that when i went to the front panel of my ender 5 and i cranked the speed up to 300 percent it didn't really print any faster what's going on there i would have expected it to print much faster well there's an overriding set of parameters that are in your firmware that gate your performance and those are the acceleration and jerk parameters acceleration is very easy how fast is your printer able to go from zero to x speed now we know it can't do it in a straight line you have to start the stepper motor you don't want to jerk it to a start it'd be like flooring your car and pushing everyone to the back of your seats probably not a good thing for the car or for the passengers or for other people on the road so you want to ease to your speed the ability of your printer to get to the desired speed is called its acceleration and in your firmware you set the acceleration you're going to allow your printer to go at if you attempt to go from zero to a hundred let's say too quickly you'll potentially damage your machine your stepper motors belts will slip other things will not work well now what is the jerk control in a 3d printer well you're running at 100 miles per hour you want to stop don't want to slam on the brakes you want to decelerate smoothly so the jerk control controls deceleration now if we look at the cura profile that's included for the ender 5 we'll see there's g code it's called the start code that sent out at the beginning of every job in that start code they override the settings in the firmware the first thing they do is they set a maximum acceleration then the next thing they do is they set a maximum absolute speed the speed you can move from point a to point b whether you're moving on the x y or z or you're using it to extrude filament then they set other parameters for specific acceleration and finally they set jerk control so these parameters which i have not attempted to tune for this video are why i'm really limited to whatever the top speed i saw when setting it at 150 even if i crank up the front panel it's going to be limited by these parameters now the one parameter i'm most likely to try to adjust is the feed rate or the maximum speed for the extruder because i'm sure this extruder can go a lot faster than a traditional ender 5 bowden style extruder so let's summarize what do you need to do to print faster well you need a more rigid frame the ender 5 has a more rigid frame you want to minimize bed movement the ender 5 bed goes up and down instead of back and forth direct extrusion will allow you to push your rates much higher because you can extrude filament much more quickly direct distribution by the way will also help when using a larger nozzle size what are the disadvantages of direct extrusion well this is clearly heavier than just this independent extruder mounted over here because this stepper motor that's right here is now mounted on top in the case of the ender 5 i'm not as worried about that because of the architecture the architecture is stuck such that there's a very rigid frame holding this x-axis in place and i've seen even at printing at very high speeds i've seen no disadvantages of that the other disadvantage of direct extrusion is when this is in a black box where you can't see it they're harder to work on but by using the micro swiss direct extrusion add-on for the under five i was able to get the best of both worlds so i now have an ender five that prints as fast as my prusa with an all metal hot end that can in fact handle all the same materials as my prusa so folks thanks for watching i hoped you learned something i learned a lot i'm really impressed with the micro swiss style direct extruder please go to forum.makewithtech.com to discuss this videos and others there i don't know 12 1300 people over there now that discuss these videos as they're released you can learn a lot both by watching the videos and going to the forum thanks a lot please subscribe click on the bell and most importantly let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

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Id: HbeiKs7MgOc

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021