 Hey everybody, today we're going to take this Ender 3 and we're going to upgrade it to Direct Drive Extrusion for only $35. My name is Jim and this is the Edge of Tech. So I know what you're thinking, why in the heck will we take this Ender 3 that's printing very good now after we got it all set up and add Direct Drive Extrusion and change it all together? Well, the reason is I want to check out Direct Drive Extrusion. So there's been a lot of debate either on the forums or on the groups or Facebook groups, whether Bodin Tube is the way to go or Direct Drive is the way to go and the guys over at printermods.com reached out and said, hey, we're going to start making and selling this Direct Drive Extrusion. It's called the MDD version 1.0. MDD stands for Modular Direct Drive. Do you want to check it out? And I was like, yes, I do. I really like getting into projects like this and, you know, so I started looking and there's a bunch of reasons why you would want to go to Direct Drive. Some of the reasons they list on the website are better flexible printings, easy loading and unloading. There's only this much in there. So that is a lot easier than pushing it all the way down through the Bodin Tube. Shorter retractions, you can really shorten up your attraction times, which is going to help on speed. Also increased extrusion accuracy, they list lighter weight than others. So there's a lot of, there's a few other Direct Drives on the market and this one actually comes in lighter weight than the other ones. This thing is really light. You get everything you need and you should be able to do it in about 20 to 30 minutes. So you take your factory Ender 3 or slightly modified Ender 3 like we have here or Ender 5 or any of the other printers that they offer and within 20 to 30 minutes you should have Direct Drive extrusion, should be printing and you'll be rocking and rolling. The other cool thing is it's made out of 6061 aluminum and right here in the USA. So I think that's pretty awesome, but I think we should get down to it. Let's do this. So when you get this in the mail you open up the package and this is what you see. A plastic bag, it has all the parts we need and we're going to go through those parts now. So this is everything that comes in the package and it's everything you need. So we got the new X carriage here. We got the extruder spacers, the wire holders, the motor spacers, the hot end spacers. The new bolts we're going to need here. The boat and tube, the push to connect the PTFE fitting here and that is a nice one with metal teeth on the inside. Very similar to what you get from TH3D and the wire harness that you're going to need to extend the E for the extruder there. This right here is awesome that it comes with that. So that's everything you get in the kit there and you should be good to go now. We're going to start the install. The next thing you want to do is grab the extruder stepper motor wire and go ahead and pull that out. The next thing I'm going to do is go ahead and cut the zip ties that are holding everything together here. The next step is to actually remove your boat and tube and your coupler, but the issue is I've been using this machine for quite a while and it is heated and cooled several times and this is stuck in there. So what I'm going to throw in there now is to leave the ex-gantry at the top, go ahead and turn on your Ender 3, go to control, temperature and turn the nozzle up to 220 degrees. So once you get to 220 degrees, go ahead and let it heat up and we're going to remove the boat and tube with a heated hot end. Okay, so now that we're heated up here, what we want to do is go ahead and push your coupler in and see how it doesn't come out. Well, that's because it's all nice and hot in there and it's stuck. So what we need to do is go ahead and grab the wrench that came with the kit and once you get the wrench that came with the kit, go ahead and loosen the coupler here. So you want to be very careful because your hot end is 220 degrees C right now and you do not want to burn yourself. There we go. So get that loosened and start turning it and it might be hard to get out. So what we're going to do is take your wrench and just go ahead and remove your coupler. So when you're all the way loose, go ahead and give that bad boy a pull and it should pull out just like that. Remove the Bowden tube from your extruder. In this case, I'm using the EZR extruder and we're going to go ahead and remove the whole tube out. The next thing you want to do is remove any extruder you're using from the stepper motor. In this case, like I said, I'm using the EZR extruder. If you're using the stock Creaudier extruder, it's still four bolts. It's very easy to remove and you can do it just like I'm showing here. The stock one, you'll remove the tension spring and then the bolts as well. Remember when you get all the bolts out of your current extruder to hold the extruder itself and the stepper motor because that stepper motor will fall out. We want to grab the small Allen wrench and we're going to go ahead and remove these two M3 bolts here to remove this. Now I do have the EZABL and that will take that mount off as well but we do want to do that at this time. So grab your Allen wrench, make sure it's the correct size. Use the small side and we always use the small side to break them loose and tighten, finish tighten because you don't want to round off that long side. It's very easy to do, especially when you're trying to tighten or finish tighten. Get both of these broken loose and remove them with your Allen wrench or an Allen driver. So once you have those two screws removed, pull out the two screws or the mount. In this case I have the EZABL mount like we talked about. I could have removed the bottom nut and pulled this out but I didn't really need to and I'm hoping to reuse that bracket. Take the cooling block off just like that and now that exposes the hot end. Once the hot end is exposed take your Allen wrench and what we want to do is remove these two here so that will remove the hot end from this carriage. Once both are pulled, pull the screws out and lay the hot end inside the cooling block just like this. Remove the belts from the carriage here and you can do that by pulling them down and out and then this should move down and pulling them down and out. Now you do not need to remove this from the pulley just from the carriage itself so your carriage is now free moving. We're going to go ahead and remove the roller wheels from the X carriage and install them on the plate that came with it in the exact same order. So this is the plate that came with it and we're going to take these two wheels and install them here, the bottom wheel and install them here and they need to be just like they're on that carriage there but on the brand new carriage right here. To remove these wheels what you need is the wrench that came with the kit and your allen wrench and on the back side of these wheels there's actually a nut and the small side of your wrench should hold that nut so you're going to position the wrench over the nut, take your allen wrench and loosen that nut up. We're going to do the same thing for this one and then we're going to put those two on the new carriage and we'll be right back to do that. All right now that we have these top wheels removed I just want to point out how they're going to go back on. How that's going to work is you're going to take your bolt, you're going to push it through and on the back you're going to take the little spacer that comes with it and push that through then take your wheel here put that on and then your lock nut goes on there so you'll grab your wrench, you'll hold that nut and then you'll come to the back here and you'll take your allen wrench and tighten that in and that's how these wheels go back on. Do not forget to put that spacer in there because if you do it's not going to sit on your excantree correctly so if you look at it like this here's your screw, your spacer, your wheel and your lock nut. We're going to put this side on and then we'll do the bottom as well. I'm going to put this side on and I'll be right back. Now take the last wheel off. This one is going to go on backwards on the trolley so remember that when this all comes off, oh you know what this one actually has a washer but because this is the eccentric nut it's a little bit different at this time if you want to take and wipe off that dust and everything that's accumulated that's fine take your eccentric nut your wheel your bolt everything that's already on throw it on like that put your washer on and then your lock nut the correct way and just like the others hold your lock nut in position with your wrench flip it over and it's going to look backwards and that's right and go ahead and tighten that in you want to make sure that's good and tight on the trolley you don't want it to come off and this your eccentric nut will adjust in a little bit it's time to start installing our extruder so take your spacer plate throw it on there and take your extruder whether it is the easy R or the stock under three or the metal one and throw it on there as well once you've got it setting on there assemble the extruder in my case it'll screw down to the stepper motor here on the stock creality extruder there's also four on the metal replacement there's also four there always be four extra screws or bolts that attach to your stepper motor from the extruder we put these two in so we got all four in and now your extruder is attached to your stepper motor it is tight and I would just go double check all your bolts you want to make sure it's good and tight on there now we're going to go ahead and take the 3d printed piece the spacer I got from the teaching tech video Michael over there created the spacers specifically to use with the easy R struder so we're going to take his spacer and we will place it on the plate we will take our extruder and the extruder normally will go on face like this so your motors here extruder is extremely close to the plate because your hotend will sit here and it'll go directly in so we want to take a screw I want to push the screw through the there we go and then through the back plate and go ahead and put your nut on the back so I tightened these two down real tight and I'm actually going to get some lock washers to replace these but I didn't have any so I'm going to do that at a later date but just to throw it out there if you're using the stock extruder or the metal extruder you're going to want to use this injected mold injection molded part as a spacer but we didn't need that because we're using the easy R that's why I did not use that part but you will see that in the instructions so if you do see that using a stock extruder don't forget to use this part now what we want to do is grab the Bowden coupler they included and twist it into the top of your hotend you want to twist it all the way down till it's tight and then release it about two turns now grab the PTFE tube they included and go ahead and push it down into that tube I went ahead and I cut a piece of TH3D tough tube and I'm going to use this push that down in all the way into the bottom make sure it's good and pushed so it's all the way in and tight you always want to make sure that your PTFE tubing is pushed all the way up against your nozzle grab your wrench and tighten that Bowden coupler all the way down all the way in and what that'll do is hold that PTFE tubing nice and tight down into the bottom of the nozzle there for the next step we'll need the two screws that came out of the hotend and we are just going to remove the lock washers from them and then we also need the hotend spacer right here the next part is going to be just a little bit tricky we are going to take our full assembly here that we've already started putting together and we're going to put the spacer behind the hotend we want to take your hotend and get that put on now the tricky part of this is the PTFE tubing has to go up into the extruder okay so when we turn around and put this on see if I can show you a little better here this hotend is going to go on here we're going to push the PTFE tubing all the way up as far as we can into that extruder and then we're going to tighten it on so push it in there as far as it goes then take your spacer put it behind there once it's behind there take one of your screws go ahead and push the screw in just like wow like that get it started take the other screw push it in make sure you can feel get that one started and you should be golden just go ahead and tighten those two down now we're going to install our cooling housing I have the easy ABL as well and the easy ABL should fit in the same holes is the original housing as you can see I have the mount on these two screws are now tightened and if you did not have an easy ABL you would just install those two screws and your cooling mount will be attached I will be printing the hero me and we're going to be fitting that on as well but not at this time I wanted to show you stock as much as I could and that's how it goes so once I found out we're not going to be removing the whole ex gantry from the machine and the new version of the instructions what I did was I went ahead and put the carriage back on the ex gantry I got the ex gantry back on the machine put the top extrusion back on and then I re-leveled everything per our instructions in Lucat fields help guide so both sides are dang near perfectly level which is great so right now I'm going to install the tensioner we're going to wrap the belt back around and install that to the bottom of the carriage I went ahead and I got your belts wrapped around and on there and I got the belt tensioned again and I was just going back and forth I wanted to make sure it's running straight in the channel you want to make sure you're running perfectly straight in here otherwise what you may need to do is shim this if you built this with our help guide with Lucat fields help guide with my video you know that and you may already have a shim so just put it back in we're running real good right now as far as belt tension goes you want to make sure you have a little bit of a snap or a twang and we do so I'll just keep an eye on this I may need to tighten it just a hair more but I think we're okay for now which is awesome so now we got everything assembled the belts back on tensioners tight everything's level on the next step something important happened and I wanted to point it out if you look at my last shot this cable was actually through underneath here and through the back it cannot be like that it needs to be around the front just like this so I had to actually remove this put it back on and start over but I wanted to show you that because I don't want you guys to make the same mistake so please remember this cable needs to be in the front it does say that in the instructions but I missed it when I put this back underneath and that was my fault going forward with the new instructions since you don't have to move the excantary that probably shouldn't be an issue but just in case remember this cable is in the front and all your cables running right in the front just like that grab your screwdriver and take out the top left screw of the extruder once it's loose it should just pull out so get it loose and then pull it out just like this then what you want to do is grab this big screw here and one of the wire holders and just install it back into the top left it's going to come out with a Philips head and go back in with an Allen wrench make sure it's good and tight because you want your stepper motor to be tight so now that that's here this can hold your wiring up like this with still enough slack here but it'll keep it out of the way everywhere else in the kit we didn't talk about this earlier but it did come with zip ties I didn't see in the envelope but they were there next find the stepper motor extension cable this one plug it into the bottom of your stepper motor once you get your stepper motor plugged in here the cable run that up and around and we're going to plug it into the stepper motor cable that is on the side of your harness so it's basically just an extension cable it'll run up and around and then plug in like that so what we're going to do now is some cable management they did include some loom that you can use for your wiring right here the problem with mine is is I already have the easy ABL wires along with the other wiring and it's just a little too small so what I'm going to do is attach it like this on the underside for now so that's what I'm going to do now I'm just going to clean this up down to about right here and then we'll go through this part next all right so we got these cabled up decently it looks pretty decent here I may change that up in the future but for now it looks okay we have our loop in our easy ABL we want to make sure we always have that loop I clipped the cable ties we needed to clip and the next thing we need to do is get rid of the QR code feel back that sticker slowly if you have any residue a lot of times you can just do this and pull it off so it cleans up very nicely so after you get this QR code off go ahead and take out the top left screw right here under that QR code and it's a long screw but once you get it started it should just pull out like this then what you want to do is grab another one of the cable holders with the 50 millimeter m3 and that's going to go in the top and also screw in like we did the other one and it's going to be situated like this and then you'll tighten it in pretty good there and then use a zip tie to connect it so it doesn't go anywhere one more thing they give you is actually a cable management piece for this back of your Z screw here or this Z stepper motor right so they actually give you this piece here you can pull those two out and then put this in and then you can zip tie your cables right down which is a really awesome I actually use this printed piece here it allows you to slide everything in one by one and it holds it all really secure in here and I prefer this one it gives a little bit of give just in case but they include this one here which is also a great alternative you can actually use that and that'll be awesome for you all right so one of the last things you have to do or the last thing is make sure your spool holders on I went ahead and flipped mine around that way when I grab a spool of filament and I drop it on here like so it'll go straight down into my extruder like this that's going to be awesome I'm going to get this thing fired up make sure it homes okay and get some test prints going and let's see what it does all right as you can see I did some testing here so the first one on this left side here is actually the print before I made the change so this is with the Bowdoin tube how the Ender 3 came stock the only thing that had on it was an easy ABL as you can see I did a retraction test and I did the micro all-in-one now I realized this is a little bit easier to read than these because I put the wrong filament in when I went back to print these I actually this is a stone gray and this is a metallic silver both by coax but this was a stone gray and this is the metallic so you it actually shines a little different you can't read it as close or as good as this one over here this is the first print that I printed with the direct drive and I didn't change anything all I did was fix the easy ABL so it leveled properly and then I printed it I didn't change any settings I didn't do anything like that and as you can see this is pretty similar actually and this one though is quite different this got a lot of stringing as you can see in there not only is there heavy stringing from the sides here but there's heavy stringing well I'd say light stringing between them but there's definitely some heavy stuff coming out the sides that the first one never got probably because I have my ender three dialed in for this and then I dropped the direct drive on it without changing anything so if you look here this is the third print all I did was tweak the retraction a little bit same thing I printed this right here and this is almost the same as the second one this all was teaching text files credit to teaching check for throwing these out there for us to test so these were just retraction tests to see where we should be and then this here I dialed in the retraction a little more as you can see not nearly as much stringing in the sides nothing across the front and the back actually looks pretty good too there's a little bit between there but that's it otherwise overhangs look pretty good and that was overall a pretty good print now I will need to dial this thing in a little better but I just wanted to get some tests some demonstrations out for this video of you know before and after all right as you just saw I dropped the direct drive straight on this ender three now we did modified it to use the EZR extruder which was pretty awesome using teaching text adapter my initial thoughts were this is gonna be pretty awesome I've never used a direct drive before it was only $32.99 on the website and this kit is pretty awesome I definitely suggest it it comes with everything you need to transform a stock ender three to use direct drive and get rid of that bowed in tube so you can judge for yourself if you like it or not but I tell you what I do and so far this thing is gonna be pretty awesome especially with that EZR extruder because we all know that the Karate extruders the plastic ones don't last very long now if you wanted to upgrade to a metal one you could still use the stock kit for this direct drive and it wouldn't change anything if you do go with the EZR extruder you definitely need to print that teaching tech adapter like I did and make it work I really like it I think it's worth the money $32.99 I spent way more on my ender three for a lot less of quality of parts and I really think this is worth it time will tell when I get my settings dialed in how awesome this really is but you know based on everything I came up with today and the install which is actually really easy if you're not filming it it really only takes 20 to 30 minutes tops and I think when you walk through it all it's actually a lot faster than it looks on film especially if you're not trying to film it like I did but I guess we'll see you can determine what you think you know from the results I got and how easy of an install it was it really was easy especially because in the new install instructions you don't have to remove the top and you don't have to remove that excantry which means if you already did the excantry rework you don't have to do it again and that is a huge time saver I really think that's awesome that they changed the instructions after we went through this and I definitely appreciate that once I found out that was changed I had already filmed most of this and I didn't go back I didn't want to go back and re-film it but check out the new instructions you don't have to remove that excantry which is pretty dang awesome well I hope you learned something today and as always keep printing hey everybody thank you so much for watching the channel if you liked it give me that thumbs up hit that subscribe button below we are growing we're going to do another giveaway at 5000 subscribers so keep hitting that subscribe button let's get this up to 5000 and if you want to follow us and see the next great video that comes out please cook that little bell right over here you guys rock