Ender 3 Direct Drive (Improved) by itchforinquiry

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

Add direct drive to your Ender 3, and see what all the fuss is about! :-) See the end of this page for larger images of the front, back, top and side of the finished product.
This thing is a remix, and makes the following improvements to Blyckert's version:
There are assembly pictures and instructions
The holes for inserting the fan case bolts are about 1.5mm wider, to accommodate larger bolt heads. They should probably be another 1 mm wider, to make assembly and removal less difficult.
Both Blyckert's design (named original), and mine (v2) are included in the download.
To ensure successful installation, you'll need the following:
A fair amount of patience. The clearances around the stock fan case are tight, and this thing pushes the limits of a 3D-printed part. (It is sturdy, but at the expense of having less space to work in.)
An extra PTFE tube of the same length and diameter of your existing Bowden tube. We need to cut one of them, making it unusable for the original Bowden setup.
A dremel or other rotary cutting tool. You may need to bore out a couple of the holes to make room for the bolt heads. This present design is just barely big enough for my bolts, but the original was not big enough. You'll see what I'm talking about in the first step of the assembly instructions, and YMMV.
As an alternative to the dremel, you could:
Measure the heads of these bolts in advance, and make adjustments to the STL model
Print out several versions of the model, with those two holes at different sizes
Or, just agree with yourself in advance that you're allowed to undo this modification, and re-attempt it later.