Bowden Tube Lock

thingiverse

If your Bowden acts like mine, the Teflon tube rarely stays tight in the small push lock brass fitting. Even with the little printable clip that forces the plastic ring to stay up...over several prints it would eventually wear a groove in the Teflon tube and keep chewing it up. Or sometimes the grippers just don't grip well at all. That problem is a thing of the past. Not being happy with clamp type locks that squeeze the tube, I looked at the solution a little differently. I discovered that a #10-24 Nylon lock nut would lightly thread on the Teflon tube. It would slip, but had good friction without squeezing the ID of the tube. Two nuts were good, and probably enough, but I added a third and found I could not slide the three together down the tube....BINGO! From there it was a simple matter of figuring out how to mount them. Borrowing from the original Bowden fitting clip, I jumped into Fusion 360 and designed a clip that holds onto the Bowden fitting (keeping the release tab fully in the up/out position) and also clips on the "Friction Body". The Friction Body is just a cylinder containing the three nuts that the tube passes through. The clip holds the two together. If you have to do both ends of the tube, you will need x2 each printable and x6 #10-24 Nylock nuts (or possibly a metric equiv). Print the parts as oriented in the STLs (verify by looking at them).