Bowden Extruder BMG Extruder Dual Drive Extruder for 3D Printer

First of this style extruder I've purchased. Having owned quite a few, I was curious as to who so many prefer actual Bondtech BMG and the various clones out there. Since this is the Trianglelabs version and was recommended to me, I went ahead and bought one. It was only $8 less than on AliExpress, and without the long wait, it seemed worth it.This thing is fantastic. It has become the extruder of choice for my current Ender 3 Pro project I have going that is based around the skr v1.4 turbo and dual extruders. I have machined a custom x gantry plate that will ride along two linear slide bearings with the second above the first and attached to an additional length of 2020 extrusion which had custom machined mounts as well. There will be one direct drive as I have currently along with the second filament path as a bowden setup. I decided against dual direct drives as I was going to lose more x travel than I wanted. This way there's always the option of directly feeding flexible or other material that doesn't play well with bowden and still have the benefits of dual extruders.This extruder is rock solid, and hasn't skipped a single step since installed. Make sure to tune your esteps, as since this is geared to produce more torque, you will need to change to a much higher number. I went from 95 on this ender 3 pro to 422.6 after tuning to extruded length. Highly recommended.

Was a great value and worked as expected

First I want to say that the extruder itself is great. I love the quality of it and the look. My printer works great now with no more filament grinding. I highly recommend this as an upgrade. Now to the issue and why I rated 4 out of 5 stars. The only issue that I have is that the screws that hold the extruder on are too short. They would probably be fine for a direct drive extruder but as a bowden setup, these screws are too short. The extruder should come with long enough screws seeing how it comes with a mounting adapter for it. There is no way the screw will even catch a thread on the stepper motor using the included mounting adapter. I ended up drilling the holes deeper on the extruder in order to use there screws. This wasn't hard to do but I shouldn't have to do this. I would prefer to get the correct screws for $40 but it is what it is. No local hardware stores carry that long of an M3 screw and I didn't want to wait any longer to buy more online and ship them. So it is still a great deal and a great extruder but be prepared to buy screws or drill the holes deeper if you want to use on a bowden setup.

I had to invert the drive gear that goes to the stepper, which requires assembling the large white gear by hand rather than sliding the assembly on as one piece. The gear simply did not seat far enough down on the stepper, or the teeth were not machined far enough down to not cause binding on the large white gear. The teeth on the dual drive metal gears mesh together roughly, with pressure on the lever you can feel the teeth click by each other. Haven't tried yet so this may not be an issue with proper sized filament (may be an issue with soft filaments still i think). I have an authentic bondtech and it does not do this, the quality is night and day. I am in the middle of a major overhaul/upgrade so I can't comment any further.

Personal favorite atm. Have tried Titan clones and have Dotbit dual drives on my CR-10 (S4) Heavy Duty. New CoreXY machines get these. A bit pricey for the clone aftermarket, but are here a lot faster than China Post

Maybe I got a bad one, but I'm sending it back.It put too much stress on my extruder motor (yes I adjusted ALL THE THINGS).It was flat-out noisy.The plastic gears are iffy.The coupler for the bowden tube is waaaay too loose for my Capricorn.The kicker though was when my PETG managed to bunch itself up INSIDE the extruder.In the end, the troubleshooting and hassle outweighed the invisible benefits. Alas.

I have modded the living bahjeezus out of my ender 3 and this is one of the best. The extruder works perfectly. I am super impressed.

So this extruder seems to be high quality. It's made out of injection molded plastic that I'm pretty sure is glass-fiber reinforced. The real BMG is SLS printed nylon. However, there are some compromises made to make this able to be injection molded. The filament path isn't exactly the same as a real BMG for example. Also the shape is slightly different.The gears seem high quality, although time will tell if they hold up. Use a light lube of some type on the plastic gear, I use a silicone grease, just be careful not to get it on the filament grippy parts of the drive gears.Set your extruder steps/mm to about 415 to start and calibrate from there. On my ender 3 with a stock hot-end I ended up using 419.2. You might have to reverse your motor's direction by reversing the wires or swapping in firmware, depending on which direction you mount it in.One thing I don't like about this extruder is there's no elegant way to manually advance filament through it. You'll have to write a g-code script to load and unload filament unless you want to turn the big gear by hand, which can be problematic since it's usually covered in grease to keep wear down.

I will say it works better than the titan that came on my machine but the extruder is flawed. Its obviosly for a 3d printer so it stands to reason that we need a little ability to tinker but it sure is nice when things just fit properly.I replaced a titan with this and i needed to use longer bolts and some shims to make it work.The bracket, motor and extruder all line up fine to bolt things together but the plastic gear sits on the tapered end of the motor gear causing it to tilt and bind up. I can not move either gear to avoid this so i used longer bolts and shims to give the space i needed to avoid the taper. I could almost understand if the bracket i used was my own and thinner but it failed with the one they supplied.I gave it 2 stars cause it works great but it lost 3 for not fitting without modifications.

Unit constantly jams