What are the pros and cons of the bowden design.

What are the pros and cons of the bowden design. I know you can put the extruder away from the moving axis which makes it so you can run your machine faster and that its harder to calibrate. Is there anything else about the two I should know about

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I haven’t implemented one yet myself, but I know they require a lot of retraction, and fast. Direct drive extruders are better able to do this.

Ive been looking at getting the Bulldog xl extruder and using it with the dowden E3D. I know the bulldog has a gear ratio of 5 to one I believe so might not move very fast.

Not only helps make the machine go faster, but helps reduce any shaking which can cause that ripple effect in your prints. Another downside to it is that there are some 3mm filaments, such as the rubber TPE filament that just simply can’t be used in a bowden style setup.

The main things im going to be printing is some ABS PLA and Teflon. Interesting havent heard about reducing the ripple effect thats nice to know

A bowden lightens up your print head assembly, which speeds up your printing a bit. The down side is that it has more problems with retraction. Plastics that are more “oozey” cause blobs when they aren’t retracted fast enough.

Check with the people at Deezmaker. They use them for their bukobot and Bukito printers so should know of problems and have some solutions.

It’s harder to retract with a Bowden extruder.

its its sounding like retraction is one of the down falls. Is this because the tube that directs the filament to the extruder is flexable and moves when its trying to retract.

Lol its harder to retract with a Bowden if your length is too long.
Get it as short as possible and you should be fine.

I was wondering about it myself - I got the obvious difference that bowden allows moving extruder out of moving print head. But then I keep seeing some printer designs using bowden and still placing extruder next to the head right on the moving axis. Never understood that and thought maybe I was missing some other non obvious benefits of bowden… Anything in that regard?

Does anyone prefer having the bowden design compared to the tradition connecting it directly to the extruder

The two benefits are making the head lighter and keeping the drive motor for the extruder out of the heated build environment. The first means you can reduce the other mechanism bits to lighter and cheaper ones for the same speed, the second means that the stepper or other drive motor wouldn’t usually require active cooling to continue functioning.

Thank you John ridley for the feed back. I think that changed my mind on the bowden design plus it will be a little cheaper. Only pros I’ve figured out is faster prints getting the extruder out of the area and no wiggle effect. Cons can’t print flexable stuff hard to calibrate, hard to load, has problems with retraction and oozeing. Which is all stuff that I don’t want with my knew machine thanks everyone for the help

I went bowden so I didn’t have the weight of 2 stepper motors and cold ends on the x carriage.

This means you can run at higher speeds without excessive vibrations.

I also did it because I was able to maintain the same x travel from the stock extruder going to dual extruders. You could theoretically gain more x travel by going bowden as well.

Really only reason I see it being worth it is if you need dual extrusion for dissolvable support