Review on 🖨️ Creality Flexible Filament Printer Extruder by Mark Lodge

First I previously bought a very similar kit and installed it on my first printer with no problems. This particular item from this seller was no longer available, but this item fit the application, specs and other important details for a machine I recently upgraded. I'm not new to this and the issues I describe are related to quality control and design. The first thing I noticed was that the extruder assembly that came with it was different than the one pictured. It uses a slightly different top clutch design, a snap-in plastic sleeve instead of a traditional pneumatic clutch. For everyone else this shouldn't be a problem, but my setup was intended for retrofitting and required the use of a traditional screw connector. I was able to fix this situation by drilling a hole and using a threaded brass insert from an old plastic extruder to create a safe point to screw in a traditional coupler. I chose this because I want to use two separate PTFE tubes. , which goes through the throat to the nozzle, and one that goes up and hits the gap between the drive gear and the bearing for better feeding of very flexible filaments. This can be done with a solid piece of PTFE with the plastic insert of the original configuration, but for future maintenance I would prefer to have the extruder mapped, which would require fewer modifications to use two barrels. Actually there are no problems. One issue is that the hotend mounting tabs are about 2mm taller and had to be trimmed in length to align the top exit of the extruder with the hotend inlet. Also, the holes for mounting the extruder motor are not centered with the hot end mounting tabs. They're close enough for this to work, but there's a slight bulge in the PTFE tubing. I'd prefer it if it was straight to minimize the possibility of over-pull on the flexible threads. The nylock nut for the lower left wheel sits too high and will collide with the printer gantry base plate when the X-axis is in the home position. This nut was fully tightened but still too high for the axle to move freely and easily back to its original position. As a workaround I just removed the nut, the bolt stays captive, and there is a second wheel on the underside of the plate so it can be used temporarily without securing the bolt, but I'll have to find a regular nut or grind that one thinner downwards to stop the interference. I can also swap the screw and attach the nut to the front of the panel. This isn't the configuration it was packaged in (all the wheels came loose pre fitted) and this isn't the configuration required by the other kit I've used on my other printer before, but it will most likely work fine. Aside from these issues, the kit is fine. All parts (mostly except for the upper clutch) are all present, the quality of all parts is comparable to the original parts they replace and they were well packaged. While I didn't need instructions for this kit, it didn't come packaged with anything, so an inexperienced user might want to watch a YouTube video or two on how to install this kit. TL; DR - this kit isn't perfect, but it can be made to work. if you have the tools.