I have Voxelab Aquila and just got the Creality Direct Drive Extruder, tell ya what it's pretty nice
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I bought a cheap dual drive clone a long time ago for my Ender 3 which I'm quite happy with.
Why did you want to originally replace the extruder on your ender 3? I've only been running mine for ~100h now, so I haven't yet figured why one would need to change it. Did yours just break?
The extenders on ender 3s are all sorts of trash, the bronze gear wears out pretty fast, tensioning issues, build quality.
How you have 100h on one is frankly a miracle. I have multiple ender3 s and I just immediately change out the extruder at this point.
Over 200h now. I rack up hours printing parts with 100% infill as they get annealed in the oven. Time will tell when I get issues. So far I've had to retighten the x axis belt once, but no other issues.
I get that the original plastic tension arms break after a while, but I hope that the metal arm on the neo will last longer. Can the softer extrusion gears be replaced with steel or some other stronger material?
They can, but really it’s not even worth it with those things, you can get cheap bag or titan extruder knockoffs on Ali- express that are a million times better. One of my Enders has a cheap titan direct drive kit and it’s actually awesome. I think I paid 35 bucks for it. And the knock off came with dual gear hardened steel gears. Triangle labs makes a killer bmg clone as well
Crap, I bought one of these and it worked well for a few months, but now my printer has been under extruding for a while and I couldn't figure out why. Do you have a better recommendation?
I ended up switching to this one:
https://store.micro-swiss.com/products/micro-swiss-bowden-dual-gear-extruder
I've heard good things about micro swiss, so hopefully this one will last.
Awesome, thanks! Just ordered one off Amazon. Hoping this does the trick.