 Hey everybody, today we're going to take this Ender 3 here and we're going to install brand new Bowden couplers and Capricorn XS tubing. My name's Jim and this is the Edge of Tech. So like I said, we're going to take this Ender 3 here and we're going to replace the Bowden couplers and the PTFE tubing. We're going to actually replace them with the Tough couplers from TH3D and we're going to take this Capricorn XS tubing as well. Now this is black Capricorn XS, you can't find this unless you are at Murph this year. Normally it's blue just so you know. The reason why we're going to do that is because historically on the Ender 3 and the Ender 3 Pro and some of the other models, the Bowden couplers that come on it are very weak and they have plastic teeth on the inside, which means it does not grip the PTFE tubing very well and eventually it'll break free and you'll start seeing your PTFE moving in and out of that Bowden coupler. That causes issues with drag, it also causes retraction issues and if you're not flowing good with your filament you're going to have all sorts of issues down on the bed as well. So the reason why we're going to use the Capricorn XS tubing is because they use a high quality virgin PTFE tube. It's a lot more slippery for one, you can actually feel it and for two the inside diameter is a little bit more tolerant so it's a lot smaller. When you put your filament through it doesn't have so much room to move in there. It's great for Luke's hot end fix as well when you use this because it doesn't leave much room for that filament to go anywhere in that hot end. So let's jump into it, let's do it. Alright so what we need is the Capricorn XS tubing, again this is black one and this was a Murph exclusive this year. Yours will probably be in blue, I did hear that there was some red floating around too. You need a side cutter that came with the kit, the wrench that came with the kit for the Ender 3, two new boating couplers and they are PC4M6 and PC4M10 boating couplers and you want to make sure you get the ones with the black tops. And the reason is because these have metal teeth inside, the ones that come on the Ender 3 have plastic teeth and that's what we're trying to avoid here. So make sure you get good ones, I really like the TH3D ones, we know they all come with metal teeth in them and they're actually really good on the compression of the top here. If I put it next to my microphone, you can hear it snapping when I push it down. And then we also need the Capricorn tube cutter, thank you so much to Steve and Buzz for giving me this stuff, two zip ties that I forgot to mention in the beginning. So the first thing we want to do is go ahead and plug your Ender 3 in and turn it on. I'm going to go ahead and push the bed back just a little bit. And once your Ender 3 is on, you're going to want to go ahead and heat up the hot end to about 200 degrees Celsius. So press your button, go down to control, press the button again, go to temperature, press the button, go to nozzle, press the button and then scroll up till you get to 200 degrees, about right there. Press the button again and you're good, it'll start heating up. So then I like to go back to the very first menu and you just go back and back and then you can see it actually heating up from there. So while that's heating up, I want to go ahead and start removing what's on here currently. So first take your cutters here and carefully cut the zip ties and you want to be very careful, you don't want to cut the wires that are underneath that and that will break the PTFE tubing free from your wire loom here. Then what you want to do is go ahead and take the wrench that came with the kit and you can go ahead and use the smaller end and take off the Bowden coupler that's on the extruder side here. Sometimes if you push this in and pull, and this is one of those times, you can actually pull your PTFE tubing out when you do that. You got to push in and just pull out your PTFE tubing. That was really easy on the new couplers, not so much. That tells me this coupler is probably not the best and that's why we're replacing it. It only takes a little bit and then go ahead and screw that out and we'll put the old one right there. Now we're still heating up and actually the temperature in the nozzle is already at 200. So what you want to do then is go ahead and take your bigger side and just go ahead and loosen up. Now the same thing here. You can push the coupler in and pull out and sometimes the PTFE tubing will come out. This case not so much. It's probably melted inside. The other thing you want to be careful is this fan is on and we heated up the nozzle. It's 200 degrees Celsius so if you go touching down here you're going to burn yourself so be careful with that. But at this time you just go ahead and loosen the old coupler. You can actually take this and just spin it out like that and go ahead and pull it out. So you can see there was some filament melted in the bottom. That's what was keeping that in there. So another thing we can see is this probably wasn't pushed in all the way which means there was a small gap between your tube and your hot end and that's why we do Luke's Fix and this is a perfect time if you're going to do the hot end fix to do that at this time. For this video we're going to keep rolling and we're not going to do that. So the next thing you want to do is go ahead and grab your boat encouplers and we're going to start up here and just hand tighten it in. So once you're hand tighten just like that take your wrench and in this case it's actually the big end. It's a bigger end than the stock one was and we're actually going to give it like a quarter turn maybe a half a turn but don't over tighten that because you will strip that out and that's not a good thing. Then what you want to do is take the other boat encoupler the bigger one and go ahead and screw it into the top just like this. Now what we're going to do is we're going to screw it all the way down until it just hits the bottom and then we're going to back it off about three quarters of a turn. All right so the next thing you want to do is go ahead and take off the other boat encoupler here and a lot of times you can't pull it off this way. So what we do is we just push it through just like that and then you want to take your new PTFE tubing in this case we're using the Capricorn XS and it's the black color like I said it's the Murph exclusive but what you'll probably be using is blue and we're actually just going to kind of do a quick measurement by lining it up next to each other and that's about right right there. So now that I know we need about that much we can grab our cutters and we can put this through and I'm going to leave it about right there. I'm going to take the white away and this is a very important part this has to be absolutely straight when you cut this so I like to set it down I'm going to set it down right here and just push it straight down and that was going to give us an absolutely straight cut. If you cut this and it's slightly angled at all you need to start over and just cut a little bit off until it's straight. So now what we end up with is a brand new tube that's just about exactly the length of it's slippery just about exactly the length of the stock tube and we'll go on to the next step. So now what we have is our Bowden tube cut our PTFE tubing cut the Capricorn we're going to go ahead and push it into the extruder side and we're going to make sure it's in all the way and very tight just like that and we're really good then we want to make sure we pull this collar out in this case these are really good collars it just popped out but if you notice I can't pull that out now it's very tight then for the hot end side what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and push this all the way down in and we left this three quarters of turn out because when we push this all the way down in with the hot end being hot 200 degrees Celsius we're going to get it all the way down in and then we're going to go ahead and tighten that in and make it tight so at this time go ahead and take your PTFE tubing I'm going to hold this and we're going to push it all the way into the bottom as far as it'll go and make sure it goes all the way down you don't want to gap in here again this is a great time to do Luke's hot end fix for this video we're just showing you how to replace this though okay so at this time you took your brand new Capricorn XS PTFE tubing you push it all the way down into a hot end you push it all the way down into a 200 degrees Celsius hot end make sure that's hot now all we need to do is take the wrench that came with the kit and go ahead and finish that three quarters of a turn tightening once you get to tight just go a little bit past tight and that's all you need you want to make sure it's tight but you don't want to over tighten into that block otherwise you could crack it so now what we have is if we grab the bottom here your tubing is not going anywhere and that is good to go now we're going to take these two zip ties that I forgot to mention in the beginning and we're just going to go ahead and tie the ender three up like it was stock so I'm going to go ahead and put one like right here you do not want to make these over tight you don't want to squish the tubing or the wires this is just to hold it together so just enough you know to stop it from sliding but not over tight we're going to do the same thing in the back here just like that I like mine a little farther down just like that we're going to go ahead and take our cutters cut the ends off of the zip ties so once we have the couplers and the boat and tubing on what we need to do is go ahead and cool down our hot end so go ahead and click go to prepare go to prepare scroll down to cool down and click again what that's going to do is turn the hot end off keep the fans running and cool down the hot end for us before we turn the ender three off and that's it we're done we have brand new boat and couplers from TH3D and we have brand new Capricorn excess tubing and this project is complete so there you go now you have brand new boat and couplers and brand new PTFE tubing from Capricorn on the ender three it's definitely going to help with the retraction so you might have to dial that in a little bit also when you're going you'll notice that it's going to hold in much much better you can print the clips if you want to print them and put in the couplers here I haven't used them after I replaced them with the TH3D couplers but if you want to do that you can one of the things to look for in the beginning you don't have to do this right away but you want to watch for this tube going in and out of that coupler the best way to do that is to go ahead and take a black marker and mark it right up against there if you see that black mark moving back and forth it's time to replace your boat and tube it's time to replace the couplers because they're not holding so that was real easy it only takes about ten minutes and it's something that pretty much everyone can do I hope this video helped you I hope you learned something and as always keep printing my cat is attacking my micro cord Caleb that's what's happening right now you have a cat attack on the micro cord hey everybody I hope you liked the video today if you did please click the like button below with the thumbs up if you want to see more click the subscribe button and if you want to be notified every time I go live or put out a great video go ahead and click that little button over here with the bell you guys have a great one I don't even know what to say so go ahead and turn it off