Reddit reviews BIQU Extruder Pulley 36Teeth Bore 5mm Stainless Steel Drive Gear for 1.75mm & 3mm 3D Printer Filament (Pack of 5pcs)

My brand new CR-10s was doing that for a the first few weeks. Here's what I did to fix it:

Calibrated my extruder, it was under extruding almost 10%. You have to change the firmware from stock to save the settings.

Replaced the extruder gear, the stock one even though new didn't feel like it was grabbing the filament well enough. Like it wasn't keeping up sometimes. I bought these: Stainless gears on Amazon. They are 36t while the stock was 40t, doesn't matter because the outside diameter was exactly the same 11.0 mm. I did recheck the calibration to be sure.

And print just a touch slower, not sure that's necessary after the first two tweaks but the prints look great now so I'm not messing with it for now.

This is a must upgrade for the CR-10. I also bought some steel drive gears as I was tired of the soft brass ones wearing out so fast and losing grip: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01J5ON2Y2?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title

I just replaced the brass extruder gear with a stainless steel one. It definitely helped my layer skipping issue. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J5ON2Y2

I fixed mine, it's printing like a dream now, but I did A LOT at once so I'm not sure exactly what fixed it.

I'm going to list the things in order that I believe most likely fixed it.


>Extruder gear replacement and re-calibrated E-steps/flow, I honestly believe this most likely fixed it. I've calibrated e-steps and flow a ton already with no improvements, but this extruder nut is way higher quality than the stock one.

>this is one I bought

> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J5ON2Y2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

> the stock brass ones are super cheap, and bend easily when you tighten them down, this one fits really snug and feels extremely solid.


I replaced my hotend for new one. I mainly did this because I broke my stock one taking it apart.


This is the one I bought.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FTMSCSN/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

What's interesting about this, is that the hotend looks very different than the one that came with my Ender. This part is straight from creality, so I really think they actually re-designed the hotend when so many people complained about it.

Some differences I noticed...


it comes with a silicon creality sock



it comes with a coupler that is MUCH stronger than the original one


the heater block is brass or something now, it doesn't look like it's steel


The heat sink is different on the inside, hard to explain, but the mouth of the heat sink look Shallower at the top and has less gap space where the bowden tube slides in.


The screws from the heater block now only barely go into the heatsink instead of halfway up.


>I PID tuned my new hotend, the values were shockingly different from stock settings once it was finished running the auto tune. You'll need to flash the new marlin in order to do this.


Replaced all my wheels and bearings for these:

https://3dvice.co/collections/frontpage/products/hd-v-wheel-completes

I immediatly could tell the printer is rolling so much more smoother after installing these. the wheel material is a lot more stiffer, I don't have any wobbling at all with these wheels. The bearings make the biggest difference I think, when spinning the original wheels in my hand I could feel little bumps and grinding, the new ones spin like skateboard bearings, smooth as butter.


hope this helps.

The stock motor should be fine, it is likely the extruder itself that is slipping. The best "cheap" upgrade on Creality machines (in my opinion) is replacing the plastic extruder with an aluminum extruder and upgrading the brass gear to a 36T or 40T stainless steel gear.

These will grip the filament much better and prevent extrusion issues. Still a good idea to calibrate your feed rate though, just to make sure your printer is getting the amount of filament that it expects.

https://smile.amazon.com/BIQU-Extruder-36Teeth-Stainless-Filament/dp/B01J5ON2Y2?sa-no-redirect=1

I bought these but they never showed up and got my money back. ended up the problem stopped for me. YMMV