Bigtreetech Upgrade Dual Gear Extruder MK8 Extruder

To get it out of the way first, yes, as everyone else has mentioned... No instructions. However, if you pay attention when you are removing your old extruder, this is a straightforward process. I have been trying in vain to get a large nozzle (1.0 mm) to work on my ender 3 pro for rapid drafting. The stock extruder laughed in my face and skipped like a record when I tried to print with the 1 mm. I installed this extruder, not really expecting that much of a difference, but I had tried every other suggestion for fixing extruder skipping. Slowed the print down, adjusted up my zed offset, changed stepper motors, checked stepper voltage, all that crap. Long story short, I installed this guy and have run a few tests. I started with a layer height of .6 at a print speed of 30. No problemo. I was surprised. So I jumped it up to the .8, same speed. No issues. I went bananas and jumped it up as far as I could possibly need it to go: 1 mm layer height at 50 mm/s (my usual speed for PETG). I'll note here that I ran it at a 1.1 layer width as well. Holy crap, it ran it no problem. You can watch your spool as the life drains out of it at that height and speed, but it does an amazing job now. Just from the extruder change. Buy it. Buy it now. BTW, you can do a layer height the same as the nozzle, but you need to know how to set your slicer. Most people recommend no more than 75 - 80 percent, and that's perfect if you don't want to muck around too much.

Much better than stock. Very simple install that cuts down on clogging and improves overall print quality. Bigtreetech just makes great stuff.

I bought two of these (one for my Ender 3 V1 and one for a V2) and love them. They DO NOT come with any instructions so it’s 100% up to you to install them correctly. Take notes removing your old one as these go together very similarly but there’s a few gotchas. Each kit comes two little brass washers. One (preferably both) of those need to go between the idler gear and the face of the aluminum tension arm. The clearance is too small to fit both, so I decided to file the top and bottom of the idler gear down just a hair so I could get one brass washer above and one one below it. If you don’t install the this at least on the bottom, the steal gear teeth will quickly grind straight through the aluminum and you’ll have to replace it. You will also need to change your E-Steps (called “Extruder transmission ratio” on the the E3V2). There are tons of Youtube videos on this, just make sure when you tell it to extrude 100mm of filament, it moves 100mm or your prints will come out ugly or brittle. After 30 large prints between the two machines, I have no issues extruding and don’t have to worry about anything slipping or breaking.

Sweetness. All Panda stuff is. So nice to quick change out the hotends. Take 30 seconds to do a swap out and get on with the print and life. Outstanding. Panda and E3D killed it again!! But stay away from the knockoff hotends. Make sure you get the Revo by E3D or Panda. The knockoffs look exactly the same but will scratch you plates and ruin them.

I bought two of these. The first one kind of worked kind of fine. The second one didn't work at all. The sleeve on the lever arm is designed to protrude from the body a small amount so that when the screw is tightened, the lever arm will still move. The first one was that way and the lever arm moved freely. On the second one the indented hole that the sleeve sets down in to was not as deep by .5mm as the first one which made the sleeve not protrude from the body. When the screw was tightened, the lever arm would not move. The second problem (with both) is that just below the feed rollers where the filament enters the hole to continue on down the path is poorly designed. The hole is so small that the filament hangs up on the edge of the hole. This makes it impossible to change colors mid print and difficult to even start a print. I think I fixed the problem by using a counter sink to open up the top of the hole and funnel the filament path. Time will tell. Anyway, I returned the second extruder that didn't work at all.

(Bigtreetech Dual-Gear Extruder) I'd give it 3.5 stars if that was an option...3 seems too few but 4 seems to many...and here's why.... I bought this to complete the mod of my Longer LK5 Pro from a Bowden Tube to a Direct Drive and replace the extruder. The printer originally came with the black, single-gear extruder with the 'wheel' that is standard on most FDM printers. This does work great and gives you great control over the filament extrusion resulting in much nicer print quality but be aware of a few things: 1) Make sure the shaft of your motor is long enough to catch the lock-screw for the gear. Luckily mine was but I read many stories of their motor shaft's being too short. You're going to need at least 20mm of shaft length to secure the gear to the motor shaft. 2) I hope you have a Dremel or way to modify the spring that comes with it. The spring they send makes too much pressure and causes the gears to lockup and you get the most sporadic extrusion which will ruin every single print. I've even had prints where it stopped extruding all together because the spring pushed the gears together so hard that it locked and seized up. I took my Dremel and cut off about 3 "rungs" or "loops" of the spring to release some of the tension on the gears and it seems to work much better and doesn't lock-up (for now). 3) Make sure to measure, calculate, and change your E-steps value on your printer! They do not mention a word of this in the listing but if you watch a Youtube video, they will tell you about it. The gear sizes from your old extruder and this extruder will likely be different and you'll need to change the E-step value. The E-step value tells your motor how much to turn the shaft to extrude a certain amount of filament. This is a MUST if you are upgrading or changing your extruder or you will never have a successful print. 4) There is not a single word of installation instructions but if you pay attention when you are removing your previous extruder, you can reverse the steps and get this one assembled and installed ok. There are also Youtube videos you can watch which walk you through assembling the extruder (as well as how to calculate and change the E-steps value). I'm determined to make this work as it does give much better control over extrusion (especially in a Direct Drive setup). It's been a bit of trial and error and troubleshooting so far but I'm confident I'll get it dialed in eventually.

I have 4 BIQU B1s and installed these on 2 of them so far. I plan to do the other 2. These are a really solid upgrade. For the BIQU B1, you need to be aware of a couple things: - The esteps will need to be changed. Mine defaulted to 98 on the old factory extruder. (That resulted in 105mm instead of 100mm extruded by the way). The correct estep value for these is 136 for a BIQU B1. You can set this via gcode using "M92 E136" then issue a save with "M500". You can also use the "save to eeprom" in the BIQU B1 menu to save. If you're not comfortable entering console commands you can use the tuning menu in the BIQU B1 and do the calibration then ignore the measurements and just increase the esteps to 136. After that, make sure you use the "save to eeprom" option. - Some slicers add esteps to the gcode. The ideamaker app that comes with the BIQU B1 does this. So you'll have to edit the printer config and go to advanced and change it from 98 to 136. You can open the gcode files with notepad or such and search for M92 and make sure it's E136 not E98 in that file. - You can alternatively do none of the above and only change the value in the gcode from M92 E98 to M92 E136 but this requires editing each gcode file after saving it. - Finally, the printer's filament sensor will be slightly too low when installing the new extruder. Ideally you need a couple more 1/4" spacers and a couple longer M3 screws. What I did is unscrew the two screws on the filament sensor and move it to the left so that the right screw went into the left hole on the holding bracket. Then I just used the right screw to hold the sensor in place. This moved it to the left almost an inch and the filament can bend a little and it works with no other spacers. A better long term solution will be to get some longer M3 screws and print a couple extra spacers. But it's been working as I set it without any additional parts.

I replaced my old (single gear) extruder with this one. I had been experiencing intermittent problems with the old extruder slipping resulting in under extrusion and poor print quality. I finally decided to just replace it with this newer style dual gear extruder and all of my filament feeding issues have gone away. The dual gear design is definitely superior to the older single gear (and bearing) design. All of the pieces of this extruder appear well made and everything fit together as it was supposed to. Nothing bad to say about this extruder kit.