Direct Drive Upgrade Available for CR-10S

The Bondtech extruder / hot end upgrade for CR-10S [Source: Bondtech]

There’s a new upgrade available for the popular CR-10S desktop 3D printer from Creality.

The upgrade is not from Creality, however. Instead, it’s from Sweden-based 3D printer accessory maker Bondtech.

Bondtech is one of those brand names that you increasingly hear about in the 3D printer space, mostly due to their incredibly popular dual drive gear technology. What’s that about?

Most filament-powered desktop 3D printers initially used a simple mechanical approach for driving the filament into the hot end. Usually that meant a toothed gear grabbing and pressing the filament into a rotating friction wheel. This arrangement works, but is generally unreliable because there is too much force applied to the filament by the single toothed gear. Stripped filaments often occurred.

Then Bondtech came forward in 2014 with a completely new idea: dual drive technology. In this approach, the friction / toothed gear technology is replaced with two identical gears that surround all sides of the filament. These operate in parallel to enable a very reliable and strong grip on the filament.

The concept has proven so successful that Bondtech now sells a wide variety of extruders to third parties for use in a number of desktop 3D printing systems. Currently they sell Bondtech extruder upgrades for desktop 3D printer models from BCN Sigma, Ultimaker, MakerBot, Raise3D, TEVO, Prusa, Wanhao, and Flashforge.

A CR-10S equipped with the new Bondtech direct drive upgrade [Source: Bondtech]

Now the company announced a new addition to their lineup, a dual drive extruder upgrade for the very popular Creality CR-10S device. This machine was the machine to get a year ago, and thousands of them are now in operation worldwide.

Unfortunately, the CR-10S suffers from a problem found in other devices: it uses a Bowden extruder. This style of extrusion involves pushing the filament a fair distance through a PTFE tube to the mobile hot end. This works reasonably well when the filament is rigid, but is catastrophically bad when trying to push flexible filaments. Try pushing wet spaghetti up a tube and you’ll understand what I mean.

The Bondtech upgrade does away with this issue entirely by replacing the extruder on the CR-10S with a direct drive unit — of course, using Bondtech gearing technology. The hot end included with the upgrade is in fact the popular and de facto industry standard E3D-Online V6, making this a very powerful combination.

The upgrade is obviously supplied as a kit and you must install it yourself — and deinstall the old extruder / hot end.

Bondtech direct drive upgrade installed on a CR-10S [Source: Bondtech]

Bondtech has priced this upgrade at US$260, in line with most of their other upgrade products.

The best part of this upgrade is that it brings new life to your now-aging CR-10S device, as the direct drive technology allows for a much wider selection of filaments in the machine.

If you happen to have a CR-10S, or any of the other Bowden-style devices described above, you might consider taking a look at Bondtech’s upgrade options. A small amount of money and a bit of effort to put it together might revolutionize your device.

Via Bondtech