The connector on my extruder housing busted somehow mid print and the PTFE tube came out, luckily it was during a color change and the printer recognized the issue and didn’t resume printing
After taking the extruder cover off I found the little metal tabs that grip the PTFE tube all busted out of the connector, which no big deal normally as I have tons of these connectors on hand but I was annoyed to find that the connector seems to be molded into the extruder housing and non replaceable.
I contacted creality and they are sending me a new one but it will be 14 to 21 days and I cannot find this part available to purchase anywhere, so now my printer is down due to something that should be a simple replacement
Hopefully someone will make and extruder cover with a replaceable PTFE connector,
Can you post a picture of the broken part please, just so i know what to look out for and maybe adapt for future failure. PTFE grippera often fail, so this sounds like a seriously flawed design!
Thank for posting this, I have a spare on order, though really hope you are wrong! I don’t want to mess with mine for fear of breaking it, it’s also busy printing at the moment. Any chance it has one of these fitted?
Thanks for posting that, do you know what these are called?
I’m not to familiar with these connectors I have only used the screw on type that are easily replaceable
I have not tried prying out the old connector, I wanted to post on here and see if there was someone more knowledgeable than me that could point me in the right direction, I am hoping these are replaceable and I just don’t know what I am doing lol
I have had the same thing as @Rob_B happen overnight. PTFE connector ejected the PTFE tube causing the filament to meet the bed.
Lucky for me I had a complete extruder so swapped it out; however very annoyed that the PTFE connector cannot be swapped out.
Also to note is that the teeth in the PTFE connector are crushing the PTFE tube therefore restricting the internal diameter of the tube. Cannot help.
I noticed that the spare tube that came with the machine are not as clear and appear to be stiffer. Have replace my tube with one of theses spares.
Hopefully the extruder spares will appear before March.
Suggest we all keep two spares in stock at all time.
Creality sent me a new one pretty quickly when I reached out to them so you want want to try that
Hopefully they can redesign this to have an external connector, there is an stl available to print that addresses this but I would like an official solution
I to will be buying a couple spares once they are available to purchase, it’s just annoying when I have a bunch of spare connectors laying around already that I can’t use
I had a few spares on order that were meant to be released come march first; however I have already received most. Sadly the ones I want for peace of mind are the extruder fronts. keeping my fingers crossed they get released early.
BTW. For info - I have received a number of extruder gears and none are marked.
I had same issue with extruder tube holder and Creality sent me a new extruder shell (this top part where the gears are in). In the meantime I ordered also one on Aliexpress as some of the spare parts got available there.
I’ve had the exact same thing happen to my K2 Plus, and Creality is playing all sorts of games with responding to my emails just asking for the ability to get/buy a replacement “Extruder Front Cover” part.
This is obviously a flawed design, and we are nowhere near the only ones with this, there IS a jerry-rig fix part that can be printed on Creality Cloud, search for: " K2 Plus Extruder Cover for PTFE tube / pneumatic fitting"
The problem is that it has to be 3D printed as well, thankfully I have another 3D printer and could print it in Polycarbonate to withstand the heat from the chamber (PLA and PETG likely won’t be good enough), and furthermore it will require a pneumatic fitting, the instructions say a PC4-M6, but I actually suggest a PC4-M10 fitting instead so you can push the PTFE tube all the way down into the extruder as it was before the “Extruder Front Cover” tore apart.
The parts are being offered for “pre-order” on AliExpress, but won’t even be available until March 1st, which is simply preposterous, and even if we can get more, they will still be the same flawed part and will likely tear themselves apart as well even if you do wait a month and a half for them to ship, and another 2-4 weeks for them to arrive from China.
In the meanwhile, let’s all cross our fingers and hope Creality will stop ignoring us, make a revised part with higher quality that will last, and provide them to their customers quick, fast, and in a hurry!
When mine busted it took about 10 days for them to send me a new one
I went on the creality website and used the chat feature, I had to provide proof of purchase and some pics of the issue but all in all it was pretty easy to get them to send me a new one
I was disappointed as at that time i only had the printer for less than and week and still wanted to use it in the meantime
I found a double sided connector in the spare parts box that came with the printer, stuck it on the end of the bowden tube that orginally went into the extruder then super glued a smaller peice of tube into the broken connector on the extruder and connected it to the other side of the double connector. It wasnt pretty but it allowed me to continue printing while waiting for the new part
This of course was before someone designed the extruder cover .stl but hopefully it helps someone who wasnt able to print that before theirs broke and dont have another printer
I thank you for that advice as well, I’ve sent a request for help from them as well… I don’t mind who at Creality helps me, I just need to get the replacement part, and I’d like to order/buy at least 2 or 3 so if/when it fails again I’ll have a backup.
They really need to go back to whomever their supplier is for that “Extruder Front Cover” part and really light into them for the quality control (or rather, the lack thereof) because like many people, I’m 2 weeks into a semi-functional 3D printer, and if it wasn’t for my OTHER 3D printer, I’d be in an even worse fix.
Creality really need to publicly acknowledge this, get a mountain of replacements on hand in all the countries they’ve sent these printers to in order to have them ready to go, and make a better part to replace them all with because the K1 extruder debacle a while back obviously didn’t teach them a hard enough lesson.
Yes, in my case one of the blades was also stuck on the magnet which generated a problem with the cutter not moving back and blocking extrusion so printer generated extrusion errors!
