Micro Swiss Bowden Dual Gear Extruder

Amazing upgrade. So much nicer to load and unload filament. No where near as much tension/pressure on the filament going through the rollers. The PTFE coupler has its pros and cons. The extruder comes with 2 brass collets/pressure fittings and with the angle needing to be cut into the PTFE for best results, you only have 2 chances to get it right. Getting the angle free hand is not ideal, I recommend a jig of some sort. Once it's in there be aware that as you do up the coupler, the PTFE will want to rotate clockwise so either compensate for that when doing up the couple by rotating the PTFE anti-clockwise before doing up the pressure fitting. Also make sure that it's positioned in relation to the gears, as the brass pressure ring bites into the PTFE and you can't seem to get it off. Pretty sure it's a one and done type thing. But once done up it holds firm. It makes passing filament through the rollers effortless. I just trim my filament to have a V point in the end and it slides right through. Thanks Micro Swiss.

The extruder on my CR6-LE had begun to only work some of the time, and I decided to take the plunge and use this replacement (actually and upgrade). The only real difference from the video guide (which uses a CR3) is that the tube that leads toward the feed stock needs to be trimmed back to couple with the run out sensor. Apart from that, follow the video and the replacement is dead simple. My printer fired up after modifying the extruder steps via the gcode file supplied, and everything worked better than they have since the printer was new. I highly recommend this upgrade.

I've tried a few of the other ones. But the micro swiss dual gear extruder is definitely the best one by far.

The all-aluminium construction means that it's fairly sturdy, and assembling is mostly easy, with the only slight hump of aligning the spring and bolting that secure. The dual-gear assembly means that you get a bigger contact patch pushing your filament, which is always good, though of course you'd be getting even more contact on the more expensive NG direct extruder.

That said, the bowden tube compression fitting needs some work. Instead of having the bolt bottom out at the correct pressure, the correct way is to leave threads showing. There's also no instructions for how to avoid over-tightening. Just a red "don't over-tighten" in the instructions. This is very vague, the closest I could get to a concrete answer is the linked ModBot video where he finger-tightens and then turns the bolt almost a full round with a wrench.

Another quirk is the included 3D printed knob. It fits very loosely, which means it doesn't quite reflect the motor's position all the time. Instead it jerks around a bit.

It's a definite upgrade to be sure, but there's room for a couple improvements

having tried multiple different extruders, I just could not get consistent tension or grip on my various filaments and constantly dealt with clogs, worn brass gears, or bite issues from not perfect spring tension.

Not anymore. Now my printer is so low maintenance between prints I barely have any reason to tinker with and re-fix my printer again so I can just move onto the next print. Hobby gets boring when there aren't problems to fix... so if you don't want problems, this is your solution!