Creality E · Fit Extruder Kit – Direct Drive & Bowden

Within the Maker community, the choice between a direct drive system or Bowden extruder upgrade for your printer often sparks a debate. But what if, you can have one upgrade for both? For the first time we’ve seen, Creality has developed an all-in-one extruder kit that you can install as a Bowden extruder or a lightweight direct drive extruder. The convenient modular design is exquisite and gives Makers who love to upgrade their printers even more freedom This new extruder is called the Creality E· Fit Extruder, with a motor and fully enclosed extruder in one easy to install upgrade.

The Creality E· Fit Extruder gives you so much flexibility when upgrading your printer. If you find yourself wishing you stuck to Bowden style or direct drive, simply switch it back without needing to buy another assembly. This kit has all the assembly parts you need to install it on your compatible Ender 3 series, CR-10 series, or CR-10 3D printer.

Standout Features of the Creality E· Fit Extruder

• Dual Drive Gears – Providing stable, smooth filament feeding, dual drive gears are a great improvement. The high torque and grip this provides help your print quality rocket thanks to added precision while printing.
• Adjustable Spring Pressure – A handy addition to the Creality E· Fit Extruder is the adjustable spring that lets you control how well the gears compress the filament. Loosen this for softer filaments that might break with too much grip. This allows you to keep a stable retraction without wearing down your filament.
• Quick Release and Filament Loading – Quickly and easily load new filament into your Creality E· Fit Extruder. Both a knob and push wheel are available to effortlessly feed your filament through. It’s quick release function also allows efficient disassembly to get to your hotend replacements easily while used as a direct drive extruder.
• Bowden and Direct Drive Compatibility – The amazing modular design of this extruder is widely compatible with Creality printers and lets you choose freely between Bowden or direct drive styles. Your choice will often depend on what you plan to print, so have a look at the end of this description for more in-depth comparisons between these style options.

Direct Drive vs Bowden Style Extruders: The Good Choice for You?

Here at DIYElectronics, we strive to stock a good selection of 3D printer upgrades and kits for improving your 3D printing experience, and the benefits of such upgrades are usually obvious from the outset. However, with an direct drive upgrade system, the benefits are not immediately obvious, and the value of these benefits will vary depending on your 3D printer setup, as well as what you really want from your 3D printer. This is because a direct drive setup is technically not better or worse than a Bowden setup, but instead just offers slightly different benefits while also having its own unique drawbacks – and this of course is why there are often debates going on within online forums about which is better, with passionate evangelists for both sides.

With this in mind, and as a means to provide some unbiased clarity on the topic (we like both Direct Drive and Bowden setups), we have found from personal experience that the key differences between the two styles is that a Bowden setup focuses on low weight, high speed and good accuracy at high speeds, whilst direct drive setups focus more on pinpoint precision, fine filament control and reduced power-loss through the various components. This is primarily why so many PLA-focused 3D printers will utilise the Bowden setup, as it offers the best speeds for producing good quality prints at a rapid pace, but if you want to start venturing into trickier filaments such as flexibles, you may start struggling due to the hysteresis (or lagging motion) and noise from the many Bowden components transferring power over a reasonably long distance.

Conversely, direct drive is the setup of choice for anyone who loves printing in flexible filaments or trickier filaments, as it has a much more constrained filament feed-path than Bowden setups, as well as a close proximity between the driving gear and the motor. This translates to much finer filament control, as the driving motor doesn’t have to push and pull the filament down a long pipe, and instead the driving motor can almost directly grip the filament, reducing potential noise between components, drastically reduced lag in motions, and what can be technically be considered faster retraction times. This kind of setup doesn’t give the filament much wiggle room (quite literally), meaning that flexibles and other tricky filaments can’t tangle, snake around gears or cause similar spaghetti-like problems.

So as you can see, choosing between direct drive and Bowden is really just a matter of what you want from your 3D printer, and if you’ve always loved the capabilities of direct drive 3D printers like our Prusa i3, but simply can’t resist the massive build volume of Bowden 3D printers like the Creality CR-10 and Ender 3 series, then using the Creality E· Fit Extruder as a direct drive upgrade kit is the ideal upgrade to give you the very best of both worlds.

Additional Resources:

• If you’re ready to install your new Creality E· Fit Extruder, here is an installation tutorial video from Creality themselves:

Although Creality 3D have been working within the industry since 2014, their addition of the Creality CR-10 series is what really catapulted them to the front line of competition, as it offered substantially better quality compared to other 3D printers – while simultaneously reducing the cost and complexities of the machines.

The quality of Creality’s 3D Printers and accessories shows through in their market history, with the brand selling around 3000 printers in their first year on the market, followed by about 10,000 sales over the next year. Now, Creality easily sells around 30,000 or more 3D printers each year, with sales continuously rising as they bring out more models. These are impressive numbers when considering the fact that they entered the industry as unknown competitors, quickly rising through the ranks and now even competing with Wanhao and similar top brands.

If you are looking for excellent 3D Printers that offer affordability without compromising on quality, Creality 3D is certainly a brand that you should take note of. From the basic Creality Ender 2 all the way up to the large build volume Creality CR-10 S5, there are few other brands who are capable of offering such a refined package while still maintaining some of the most enticing prices in the industry.