I wanted to try the Bondtech BMG style extruder on my custom printer I've been working on recently. I print mostly PETG on this machine and don't get much use out of the Bowden setup, especially with the crappy Anet extruder from an A8 dispenser for this build. lol I did a little shopping and found this at a price I couldn't beat in the US. Top notch one day delivery made this a no-brainer. I first received a pack of extruder labeled silicone pads but Revain immediately sent a replacement which I received the next day and sent back the silicone pads. (The seller also informed me that they had a bunch of mislabeled shims and fixed the problem, which was nice.) So, let's get to the extruder itself. I haven't used a real Bondtech or other clones for comparison, but I personally don't see any problems with it. They are injection molded, not printed like the original. All of the gears appear to be of decent quality and everything fits together nicely. The main shaft has ball bearings on the inside and the intermediate wheel has needle bearings. The bearings and gears in mine were dry and I would suggest putting a drop of light machine oil in the ball bearings and some light lithium grease (not oil based!) in the gears and needle bearings. Use it sparingly, you don't want any of this going into your thread path. LOL Also, my older geared door seemed to have a little more play side to side on the shaft it rides. I routed it on one side with a thin M3 washer that fits perfectly to better align it with the main gear while still leaving it free to move as needed. So a little more attention to detail in assembly will go a long way, but I don't mind spending a few minutes on "maintenance" to save about $60. lol Performance wise it does a really good job of feeding filament, which is what it's supposed to do. :D I'm using a V6 clone hot end mounted directly in the extruder and it works very well. I was able to reduce the deduction from 5.5mm to 1.5mm, which made printing faster and still gave better results. I started with the suggested 415 steps/mm in Marlin with 1/16 microstepping and then calibrated to 413 to fine tune. Yours will likely be slightly different, I suggest you take a few minutes to calibrate it. It's worth mentioning that even with the tensioner door open, the main gear still grips the filament so tightly that you can't insert and remove filament without running the extruder. I've used the options in Marlin to set up thread loading/unloading in the menu, which makes this process much easier. A standard firmware printer would be difficult to deal with and there is no easy way to load or unload it other than manually start the extruder in the motion axes menu. All in all, I highly recommend this. In fact, I liked it so much that I ordered another one to connect to another printer. :)
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