After making a few test prints, I realised that the filament wasn’t being delivered properly from the plastic extruder on the printer. I tried a metal extruder, but it had the same problem. The reason for the problem is that the original style extruder has one gear and a bearing. The gear provides the push into the printer, the bearing on the other side is to help guide way, but it doesn’t help pushing the filament. I found that this was letting the filament slip a lot.

Enter the dual geared mechanism. This has a two gears, one each side of the filament. This provides pushing force on both sides of the filament just like you’d do with finger and thumb. Doing this upgrade made the prints much more consistent.

however, there’s one finally step that is needed to make sure it’s working properly. That is to tune the e-steps. This makes sure that the printer really pushes the amount of filament that the software thinks is being pushed.