@Jason_D i bought this one. Bolted straight on and havent had an issue since.
I bought a similar extruder assembly for a “yet to be built” future printer. Overall its a decent design, though the plastic versions of these should still work perfectly fine for hundreds of hours of printing.
One thing I’m not a fan off with that extruder design is if it uses a grooved bearing pushing against a “spur-type” gear. I find that a flat bearing surface pushing the filament into a grooved drive gear has a much better grip. I print a lot in TPU filament and find that in a lot of printers bearing is grooved too deeply to grip the filament well enough to print with TPU.
@Jason_D So I’ve been doing some looking and I think I might just replace the whole extruder itself. There are some fancy looking ones on eBay that would probably work a lot better than the one I currently have. I am going to wait for a little bit and try to get this one working right first. Because it has been doing pretty good with this current print. I think I just need to use a different design for the support material. I’m guessing that printing a layer height of .1mm is just too thin and as the plastic comes out it’s pushing the lower layers out of the way. Maybe going to .2 mm and using a honeycomb design will fix that issue. If it’s still popping after tweaking some settings like that, I’ll probably just replace it. But I’ve learned so much after the last couple of weeks that I’d have a better idea of what to buy next time. Hell, I might even build one. I’ve been contemplating just making new parts for my current setup. I work for a custom automation company and have access to everything I could possibly need to stiffen this thing up. The motors seem to be pretty good though so I might just keep the current parts and rebuild the frame of it. I could get some laser cut steel or maybe just some aluminum extrusion. We’ll see what happens. It’s not uncommon for me to buy cheap stuff and fix it up so it’s better than the more expensive stuff. You should have seen my last short course RC truck. I had about $300 into it and was beating guys at the race track that had trucks over $1000.