Micro Swiss NG Revo Direct Drive Extruder | Ender 5 Series

The world of 3D printing is constantly shifting and improving with so many new models, designs, and innovative ideas taking flight. As the industry grows, you might feel left behind in the trenches. We haven’t forgotten you. With the development of exciting new 3D printing technology, we make it our mission to get hold of awesome 3D printer upgrades that get your old favourite 3D printers up to scratch with the newest models. Your ideal 3D printer setup is defined by what you want from your machine and this Micro Swiss Revo Extruder may be just what you’re looking for.

This Micro Swiss NG Revo Direct Drive Extruder for the Ender 5, Ender 5 Pro, or Ender 5 Plus is an amazing upgrade that combines the fast-paced RapidChange Revo with the genius of the Micro Swiss NG extruder. Designed to fit your Creality 5 printer, the Micro Swiss Revo DDS Extruder is designed to turn your machine into a direct drive 3D printer. Throw aside the Bowden tube and enjoy the smooth direct drive feeding system of this lightweight extruder. A direct drive extruder sits on the gantry itself close to the action of the hotend, shorting the travel time of your filament dramatically. This setup is perfect for printing flexible filaments that tend to snag and clog within a Bowden style printer. With their NG Direct Drive, Micro Swiss have shortened the filament’s travel with a TwinCladXT plated path of less than 41mm. Tangles and blockages are less likely with such a short travel path and precision control thanks to the bevel dual gears.

The upgrade also includes a RapidChange Revo hotend and an ingenious angle-mounted configuration. The Micro Swiss NG Revo DDS Extruder looks damn impressive sitting on your 3D printer and functions at a high level of efficiency too. The drop-in upgrade offers you the full benefits of an all-metal RapidChange Revo hotend. This hotend heats up faster than a racing rabbit up to 300°C, allowing you to print quickly and easily. The Micro Swiss NG Revo also uniquely has its motor mounted at an angle, freeing up space without compromising on the steady feeding of your 3D filament and eliminates wobble. The whole design makes for a compact lightweight direct drive extruder.

Are you ready to step out of your comfort zone in 3D Printing into what direct drive has to offer? The Bowden setup feature on beloved machines that all have fantastic turnouts. Direct dive is simply another style that happens to offer incredible benefits for printing usually challenging filaments for 3D Makers. It must be noted, however, that although we simply love this extruder upgrade, we also know that it’s not going to be for everyone, so be sure to check out the final paragraph of this description to get a better understanding of whether this upgrade is a good choice for you.
 

Please Note: This Micro Swiss NG Revo DDS Extruder and hotend assembly are designed specifically for the original Ender 5 series of 3D printers from Creality. But is not compatible with all models. We highly recommend you carefully check the compatibility section in the table below to ensure that this extruder will fit your particular 3D printer.

Please Note: This kit does not include roller wheels for mounting this carriage onto the Y-Axis Gantry. Fortunately, you can simply use the stepper motor and roller wheels you currently have, which of course saves you from unnecessary extra cost.
 

Is This Micro Swiss NG Revo Direct Drive Upgrade a 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 this 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, we hope 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. 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. Instead, the driving motor can almost directly grip the filament, reducing potential noise between components and drastically reducing lag in a motion that can technically be considered reaching 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. 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 Ender 5 series, then this direct drive upgrade kit is the ideal upgrade to give you the very best of both worlds.

Additional Resources:

• If you are interested in upgrading to a direct drive setup, but aren’t exactly sure if it would benefit you or not, check out this helpful MatterHackers Extruders 101 Crashcourse, as well as this Bowden vs Direct Drive Guide from Fargo3DPrinting, which both cover the benefits and drawbacks of Direct Drive and Bowden setups, so as to help users understand which is better for their Making and fabrication applications.
• The Micro Swiss NG Revo Direct Drive Extruder comes installed with a ready printed fan shroud, but they have shared the STL Shroud and Bracket Files for Makers to print in their own funky colours and filament.
• Finally, Micro Swiss also shared an installation guide for the NG Revo DDS Extruder.

If you’re interested in a visual review of the Micro Swiss Revo extruder, this informative YouTube video by Thomas Sanladerer explains everything you need to know:

Within 3D Printing, there are a few brands whose hard work has made them stand out from the rest, with real innovation and the ability to not only refine old designs, but actually redesign from the ground up to offer more comprehensive upgrades for 3D printing enthusiasts and Makers throughout the world.

Micro Swiss is one such brand that perfectly fits this description, and since their founding back in 2015, the Micro Swiss brand has garnered world-wide attention for the quality, material composition and precision of their hotends, nozzles and other all-metal components. With a core focus on TwinClad XT Plated Brass Nozzles and All-Metal Hotend Upgrades for some of the most popular 3D Printers on the market, it’s no surprise that one of the easiest and most effective upgrades available to Makers are Micro Swiss Replacement Parts and Upgrade Kits.

In addition to the amazing 3D Printing components and upgrades that they produce, Micro Swiss also specialise in Swiss Turning, which is capable of precision CNC machining outer diameters as small as 0.0127mm, as well as CNC milling, tapping and post machining finishing for prototyping. These service offerings and correlating skillsets ensure that the Micro Swiss team is more than just capable of producing consistently high-quality parts, but also capable of identifying precisely where each part could use improvements.

As manufacturers and end-users of everything they produce, Micro Swiss is one of the most impressive brands we’ve had the pleasure of dealing with, and we look forward to all of the exciting refinements and developments that they are bound to bring out in the future.