CR10 NEMA17 Extruder w/ Adjustable Tension

thingiverse

I didn't like the stock extruder on my CR10s. It would heat up after long prints, causing the spring to lose tension and resulting in print failures. No good at all! Additionally, I tried printing some flexible stuff with it and it erupted out from the extruder like spaghetti - yikes. So I designed my own extruder from scratch that would let me adjust the tension of the engagement and fully encapsulate the filament as it rode through the gearing. I tried to design around all of the stock hardware supplied with the CR10s because I was lazy and didn't want to buy screws and springs. I forget if I achieved that goal, there's been so many mods to my printer. At minimum, you'll need to pick up one 608ZZ bearing: it provides engagement pressure from the spring/screw to the filament against the hobbed gear attached to the NEMA17 motor. It's all M3 screws holding things together - one of them is a countersink flush-mount head that sits underneath the floating arm. You can use the stock Creality one. I forget what I finally did to couple the tension adjustment screw that inserted through the back of the arm to the back of the spring that should pop neatly into the indents in the extruder base and the arm. I've used everything from pieces of BIC pens I chewed the end off of, wads of paper... A long M3 screw should go through the arm, through an M3 nut, and press into the back of the stock CR10 extruder spring by whatever means. Maybe extrude a blob of plastic and finger shape it. You can print these in PLA, but the arm and the base will eventually warp in funny ways due to heat creep until the filament binds entirely - that's a few hundred hours out. I reprinted in PETG and everything has been butter for over a year now. Apologies for the random 3mf format, this was one of my first mechanical engineering designs I tweaked and retweaked over a year+. Cut my teeth on this, it wasn't until later that I learned 3mf was a superior (storage saving) format. Yeah! Have fun, please be nice to the environment and be responsible with your plastic waste <3 <3 <3.