Official Creality Ender 3 Direct Drive Extruder Kit, Comes with 42-40 Stepper Motor Hotend Kit, Support Flexible TPU Filament, BL Touch, Compatible with Ender 3 Pro/Ender 3 V2

Item arrived quickly, was well packaged in a padded box, and was fully assembled. Even came with a tool kit. Installation was simple, but understand the installation instructions are for wire hookup only. There are plenty of online tutorials on how to install. This is a plug and play item. No fancy coding skills necessary. The only issue I had (as others have had and reviewed) was the temp sensor was over tightened and shorted the thermistor. This shows an “over-temp” when you first go to use it. Back the screw off slightly and good to go. Manually leveled my bed and have been printing for 3 days now with zero issue. Printed nylon at 260°c with no issues. As for the other reviews stating the rollers were too tight, mine weren’t. I literally removed the old end and installed this one without any adjustments necessary. Rollers were correctly set. For the price of a new hot end that is nylon capable, this was well worth the money I spent. Couldn’t buy a decent all metal hotend for this price. It even uses standard nozzles (which I have a ton of). And it’s a direct bolt on. 5 stars from me, even with the thermistor screw issue. Will be buying more for my other Ender 3’s.

This thing is great, it really is a drop in component. The writing was a little intimidating until i waded in and then after watching a video on yt it was very easy and hassle free. I have about 20 hours of printing on it after several test prints and the print quality is better than microswiss bowden setup i was running previously. I did not have to adjust the esteps, only the retraction distance and speed. For reference 1.8 for retraction distance and 25 for the speed seem to be a good place to start. May do some fine tuning from there, but those setting are working well for what i am printing now.

Works perfectly for printing TPU, which was the main reason for the purchase. However, as stated by another reviewer, the screw for the thermistor was screwed on too tightly causing an error that won't allow you to print anything at all. Luckily I had seen that review before making the purchase so I knew it was a potential problem to be aware of - with an easy fix - I just had to loosen the screw a bit. This wouldn't be an issue at all if the product contained better instructions explaining this to the user - I'm sure this single issue has caused the product to be needlessly returned many times. Due to this, I'm rating the product only 4 stars. Please include better instructions to save people time and from any headaches/frustration and this product would be an EASY 5 out of 5 stars. Aside from that minor setback: considering the amazing price for what you get, plus the improvement in print quality (and most importantly frustration-free TPU printing,) I HIGHLY recommend this product!

I've been trying to print a pretty large object (~19 hour print) on my Ender 3 Pro for a couple of weeks but it keeps failing. You can see in the first photo that there are defects at various levels before the print actually failed with filament failing to come out of the printer after about 3 hours. It turns out that this was due to under extrusion. I was planning to replace the extruder arm as it had a hairline crack, but for a little extra money I decided to upgrade to this direct drive extruder. The item printed *perfectly* the very first time as you can see in the second photo.Installation was pretty straightforward but the instructions that came with the device were severely lacking - all I received was the circuit board layout (visible in photo #3). Fortunately I ordered the product for myself and was aware that there was a good video on this product listing - I might have been a little lost had I received this as a gift. To complicate installation a little I, like many, have a non-Creality board in my Ender. I took photographs of what was currently plugged in where, and was able to attach the new hot end to the same ports on the motherboard. Everything else was smooth sailing and the video in this listing accurately depicts the installation process. The hot end worked first time and I am delighted to final complete this 19 hour print.If you're having any printing issues I highly recommend this upgrade!

The media could not be loaded. I have been 3-D printing for at least eight years and I was getting so frustrated with this Ender 3 which had been working wonderfully for a long time but lately I’ve had nothing but clog clog clog. I tried everything to eliminate heat creep and tried to change every setting possible and cleaned everything out, but I was getting nowhere. The conversion process is utterly simple. For those of you have never adjusted the extruder on the Gantry. Don’t forget that there is a hexagonal bolt on the bottom pulley wheel of the extruder that can be tightened or loosened to eliminate any slop. Releveled my bed and immediately started printing a perfect print . In addition, I can now use significantly faster speeds. It appears with no problem.

Where to start. It looks great in theory. Installed fine. As soon as I turned the printer on I got error beeps. After some googling I investigated the hot end thermister... the screw was tightened so much that the wires were shorting out to the block. I ordered a new one and fixed it enough to get to printing. Second, it just wasn't printing right... seemed like it wasnt getting hot enough. After looking it over I found the heating element was loose... when I went to tighten it I found that the allen screw was stripping the heat block. The thermister screw had done the same, seems like this block was some weird cast metal that seemed to just fall apart. I'd already hacked it apart enough at this point I just continued and swapped hot end blocks with my old one, etc until I got a working hot end but good grief the quality on this unit was terrible. I wouldn't recommend this if you don't know what you're doing to be able to look for the terribly obvious flaws in manufacturing.