Micro Swiss Direct Drive Extruder for Creality CR-10 / Ender 3 Printers

This modification works well and simplifies 3D printing.

A good all-metal hotend and direct drive carrier open a world of possibilities with your printer. With the incredible machining work on this all metal direct-drive hot-end, it’s quite impressive that MicroSwiss has been able to keep the price point as low as they have. The backing plate/carriage is quite versatile, with extra holes to mount other fan shrouds, sensors, etc. and sets the heater block roughly in the same place as a stock ender 3(version whatever). The carriage and direct drive unit all mount in a very balanced way, and I have not noticed any negative effects from the extra weight on the gantry, but a second Z-axis lead-screw was helpful. The heater block and heat break are of equal quality to the carriage, heating up much faster than stock, with no more PTFE tubes melting, and is ready for a higher temp heater cartridge and a +300C thermistor. May upgrade to a K-type thermocouple in the near future.

My Ender 3 needed a new hot end and I was deciding between this and the basic Micro Swiss hot end. I decided to take the jump and get the more expensive one and I will never be looking back! MicroSwiss made this incredibly easy to assemble and dial in, once you make a couple changes to firmware you’re ready to make some accurate prints!

This thing rocks. 10/10 would recommend. You dont need to do this to make your printer print better if everything is running fine stock, but it is absolutely worth it if your printer is messed up and needs replacement parts anyway.

I ordered this upgrade for my CR-10 after I had some sort of failure of the factory extrusion head that caused my heating block, heat sink, and fans to become a giant, fist sized ball of plastic. I had been wanting to go to direct drive for a while, based on experience with some other printers with it, and this failure was the push I needed to order the Micro-Swiss kit. The Micro-Swiss kit is exceptionally well made, the base bracket is machined aluminum, and it all fit together very easily following the video that is linked from their website. They include a small business card with a QR code that takes you to the video, which is nice. I did have one small issue, the countersink for the shoulder screw for the lever arm wasn’t quite deep enough, and as a result, the screw would pinch the lever arm tight against the base bracket when tightened down, rather than the lever arm floating on the screw shoulder. I fixed that with some very light filing of the back side of the lever arm pivot boss to effectively make it thinner, it took only a few passes of a fine tooth file to get it to fit as intended, so, I consider this within the regular fit and finish of installing something like this, but could be fixed at the factory by cutting the screw countersink jsut a hair deeper. I calibrated the steps on my CR-10 following a few videos off YouTube, and I settled on 139.25 steps per mm as optimal. One other thing that must be done is offsetting the X and Y home, as the true, limit switch driven home now hangs off the build plate a bit. I am getting beautiful extrusion with this direct drive kit; the dual mesh drive rollers really bite hard into the filament, and the heat brake works amazing. You can heat the head up, unload the filament drive lever, and pull the filament back out of the hot end no problem, and the end that comes out looks like it’s been clipped by a pair of scissors! No swelling of the end in the brake like some hot ends, no stringy tail, just a clean square end. The first time I pulled the filament back when doing the step calibration I thought it broke off in the extruder, but, 3 more tails exactly the same has me convinced The heat brake just works that good! I’m running a .8mm nozzle in my CR-10 at 70mm/s speed and this extruder kit has absolutely no issue keeping up!

I picked this up to start modifying my creality ender 3 and this made a world of difference with my prints with both quality and speed.

This is a fantastic and easy-to-do upgrade to your 3D printer. The construction is solid and after a few minor adjustments, the print quality is great!

I bought this for higher temp plastic. It works well and has yet to clog. Im not seeing any improvement in print quality over the original or another direct-drive kit. I am happy to not have clogs with the higher temp plastic (PETG v. PLA).

This is just my experience and others may very bought February 15 by August 10 it was done for first started leaking from heat break down in between nozzle and threads then came out of top of heater block the entire time would not stay tight every print nozzle started moving or leaking tightened it up for the 9k time and came loose again but set screw stripped when backing out this has been a journey and I wanted to like it but definitely temporary. Maybe I got a bad one but I cant see buying another. Also all my prints had metal flakes in them from the coating came off during print

works great on replacement for ender 3 pro. also had the hole predrilled to install BL touch. Thing to remember is to down load the firmware to change the gear/ratio to 130 to prevent over/under extruding.