Micro Swiss NG Direct Drive Extruder for Ender 5 / 5 Pro / 5 Plus

The Micro Swiss brand has delighted us at all turns with intuitive upgrades for our favourite Creality 3D printers. We will always adore the genius ingenuity of Creality printers that bring so much joy to beginners, but as Makers, we understand the need to make it better! While these amazing machines are just as capable of producing great prints, their standard Bowden extruders and stock hotends are not optimised for the likes of flexible TPU filament and other exotic polymers. Makers who wish to take their 3D printing to new heights can delightedly turn their trusty Creality printers into direct drive using Micro Swiss upgrades, like their new NG Direct Driver Extruder.

This Micro Swiss NG Direct Drive Extruder is designed to transform your Creality Ender 5, Ender 5 Pro, and Ender 5 Plus 3D printer with a next generation bevel gear drive system. The extruder assembly is manufactured with breath-taking machining with a compact lightweight design by industry experts. 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. Stepper motors are one of the more awkward components to fit into an effective direct drive design, but the Micro Swiss NG Extruder positions it in the ideal cantilevered position using the bevel gear system and stabilises the whole assembly. Complex prints that require as little wobble as possible are a joy to try with this direct drive upgrade – try it; we are in love.

With a Micro Swiss all-metal hotend included, the Micro Swiss NG Direct Drive Extruder provides Makers with high quality for high-temperature printing. The extruder body is mostly made from CNC machined aluminium, but the gears are reinforced with hardened steal to ensure durable strength while driving the filament. On top of upgrading to direct drive, you can take your Creality printer from the standard 260°C to a whopping 300°C in print temperatures with the ready to go all-metal hotend tucked inside this extruder assembly.

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 beautiful NG DDS Extruder and Hotend assembly is designed specifically for the original Ender 5, Ender 5 Pro, and Ender 5 Plus 3D printers from Creality, but Is not compatible with all models. As such, it’s important to check the compatibility section in the table below to ensure that it will work on your particular 3D printing setup.

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 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, Ender 5 Pro, and Ender 5 Plus, 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 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, the following video from ModBot is an awesome demonstration of precisely what’s required when installing this NG DDS extruder system onto a Creality Ender 5 3D Printer. if you need further information before giving in to the urge to upgrade your already-awesome 3D Printer, or if you’re just eager to see what this installation process entails, be sure to check it out:

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.