 In this video I'm going to show you how to take off that plastic extruder that came with the Ender 3 v2 and replace it with the metal extruder from TH3D. My name is Jim and this is the Edge of Tech. Like I said today we're going to be replacing the plastic extruder that came on the Ender 3 v2 with a metal extruder from TH3D. This is a super easy thing to do and we're going to go through it quick. A matter of fact once you do it once or twice it actually only takes about five minutes to do. So we're going to go through it step by step we're going to get it changed out and it should perform much better than the plastic extruder that came on the machine. The reason why we're doing this is because a lot of times the plastic extruders either wear a groove in the arm or the arm actually breaks underneath it cracks then you'll notice that your machine isn't extruding correctly. One of the good signs of a broken extruder for the plastic version is that your gears will be turning but the filament isn't going through and I'll tell you what if you look under the little arm the one that you squeeze on the plastic extruder you might find a little crack in there and that is causing it not to have enough tension to push the filament through. It's one of the reasons why we like to go with the metal ones. Now the Ender 3 v2 has an extruder on there that they actually put a metal insert in the arm where the filament goes in. While I do think this is a great upgrade just from being straight plastic because I don't think it will wear a groove in there quite as fast I do think it's still going to be an issue. We're going to swap this out today and we'll be one step closer to having an Ender 3 v2 pro. Let's do it. So the first thing you want to do is remove any filament that's going into your extruder. Just heat up the hot end and pull it out of the machine. Now that the hot end is heated up I'm going to push the filament in to extrude just a little bit out and then I'm going to pull my filament out like this. Now we're going to start by taking the old extruder off. So pull your cabling out if you have it in there. Then you want to take off the blue extruder handle that came from Creality. I want to pull out the little C-clip here. Now take off your Bowden coupler here and that leaves our extruder and the stepper motor right here. Now if we're looking from above we want to remove this spring first. So you can take the allen wrench that came with the kit or any other allen wrench you have. Take that screw back out and that should allow you to pull your spring out like that. Then you want to take off the arm which is this screw back here. That'll remove the arm and the pulley. The next thing I want to do is take off the gear so I'm going to take my allen wrench and just loosen those grub screws. There's two of them one here and one back here and that'll allow the gear to come off and it'll be free like this. Then take your next allen wrench and you want to take out the three screws here but this is where we want to be careful. When we take these out the stepper motor could fall so you want to hold underneath here while you take these out and when you get to this third screw it does get really loose so you just got to be very careful. Lift that up and take our stepper motor and set it straight down on the bed of the printer. So this is everything you get in the THRD aluminum V2 extruder kit. You get your plate and your arm, a spring, the upgraded steel gear, of course a pulley, a boat and coupler, and some screws. So now we take the stepper motor and we're going to push it up through the bracket. We're going to take our new plate and set it right on top. Then we're going to take the shortest little M3 tapered screw and put it in that corner right there and it goes in this corner. You can see that that corner is already tapered in the aluminum and we're just going to screw this down so it holds our stepper motor and our plate in place. Now we might need to adjust the plate a little bit when we get these other screws going but at least now it's not going to fall on us. Something to point out, you want to make sure that it's facing this way. So this is where we're going to put our boat and coupler we took off earlier and the filament is going to pass through this way here. If this is facing this way it will not work. The next thing we want to do is take our little gear here and put that on. So we're going to slide it down like this. It's very important that one of the grub screws here match the flat spot of your extruder. So I zoomed in a little closer to show you that this is the flat spot of the extruder shaft and this is one of our grub screws and you want to kind of align it with the hole that goes through here. You can tighten them both in. Now we have the metal gear installed. Now what we're going to do is put the pulley on our arm here. So what you need is a little lock washer, the M4 bolt and your pulley. So we will take the pulley, we will set it on like this. So take your lock washer and put it on the end of your bolt, put your bolt down through the pulley, then take your M3 own wrench and tighten it down. Now you just want to go so it's tight and this should still spin. Now we're going to put the insert in. So take your insert and put it in the corner here. Then you want to take your cap head screw like this and then it should look like that. So turn it over, then take one of the included washers and put it on just like this. So I flip this over and this is the inside of the arm. We're going to take one of the M3 bolts and tighten it down right into the arm here. So now what we have is our sleeve, a washer on the back and an M3 in the side of the arm. Now making sure that the washer does not fall off the bottom of your arm, slide it back into that back corner and it should sit down just like that. Once you make sure your cap is pushed down all the way here, tighten the screw down. So once it's tight it'll be pretty hard like that. Now you don't want to go that tight because your arm needs to move. So I just go to tight so it can move but it's not crazy loose. It's not moving up and down. Now we take the spring that came with the kit and squish it in between just like this. You want to make sure your spring is lined up there because we're going to take another screw and we're going to put it right in here to hold that spring in place and make sure it's tight and it should be in the center of your spring. The end of this spring is around that other screw we put in here and this end of the spring the screw is coming through so it can no longer pop out and then when you press in it gives us this nice spring and it gives us great tension with the new stronger spring here. Next step is just to simply install these two bottom screws here with the remaining M3 screws that are in the kit and they just tighten right down into the stepper motor nice and tight so that doesn't move at all. Now take the boat and fitting that came with the kit and turn that right into the end. Take your wrench that came with your printer and give that a good like half a turn past hand tight. Now I removed the old boat and fitting from the end of my tube so we want to take and push this one in as far as it goes and you want to make sure this is super tight in there and inserted as far as it can go. Then you can take the included Creality C-Clip put that right here and that's it. Something I always do is I take a cut piece of filament I push it in just to make sure everything moves freely then when you let it go that gear should be grabbing it. We can take the included Creality knob and put that back on and when we turn it you can see our filament is going in and out and the gear is grabbing it nicely. Just a quick heads up it's always good to recalibrate your E steps on any machine that you change out the extruder or hotend on. You can see a video above about recalibrating your E steps and it's also linked in the description below but make sure you do that because it's very important because it's probably going to change. So that's it we've successfully installed the TH3D Aluminum V2 extruder to the Ender 3 V2 and now we have a much better extruder installed on this printer. This is going to last a lot longer than the plastic one does even with the little metal insert I think. There are a lot of people that still like the plastic extruders and that is totally okay. I prefer the metal ones myself and I really like this upgrade because it's cheap it's very fast and it's super easy to do. Again you can do this in about five minutes and all you need is your allen wrenches and the wrench that came with your Ender 3 V2. Well I hope you guys learned something today and as always keep printing. Hey everybody I hope you liked the video. Give me that thumbs up if you did hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and the bell right over here to get notified anytime we go live on Monday for hot makes or we put out a new video. You guys rock!