Replace Genius Pro Extruder

2022-11-05 463 words 3 minutes

Contents

I broke the hotend of my Genius Pro - and decided to exchange the entire extruder with the “all metal” one. This is a short overview.

How it started

Some month ago I learned about the new arachne perimeter generator. It is now possible to generate wider or thinner perimeter as it is needed. And I wondered: Will this allow me to print (almost) same quality prints with bigger nozzle sizes? So I replaced my .4 nozzle with a .6 nozzle and went for it.

How it went

Even though I didn’t notice much of a difference with the first few prints: Over time the prints became worse; I considered fine-tuning some print parameters as different nozzle sizes would probably also result in other extrusion rates, retract values etc. However, it does not seem to be too dramatic - so I went with it for some time.

Which was a mistake.

After degrading print quality for a longer time, this print motivated me to investigate

Especially the stringing was something I wanted to fix. I varied hotend temperature, retraction and flow rate.

After a print with bad stringing and a lot of other issues motivated me to investigate that topic, I started printing some test prints with the goal to reduce stringing. Temperature, retraction, flow rate… non of these typical candidates yielded improvements. I decided to check the hotend - as a plugged nozzle and similar issues can also cause that kind of issues:

I finally decided to check the hotend and found a mess - which I didn't excactly improve when trying to fix it.

But also the ball bearings of the extruder gear… looked a bit worn out.

The picture above doesn’t even tell the whole story: The hotend was completely coated with filament. And when I started removing parts of the filament, I even managed to rip of the control cable. And let’s put it that way: A part of the nozzle also decided to stay with the hotend… What a success 🎉.

How it ended

I thought about replacing just the hotend honestly - you usually get it for around 20€. At the same time I was wondering if I couldn’t easily swap the extruders and at the same time fix some other issues such as the cheap plastic extruder lever of the default extruder or the limited temperature capacity. So I went with the “Full Metal Extruder” that is offered by Artillery - and which I found discounted.

The extruder can be replaced with just three screws - and so after a few days, the new extruder was mounted.

New all metal extruder mounted to the Genius Pro.

Even though not yet perfectly dialed in: The stringing improved a lot right away.

The first prints also looked promissing.