Triple the print speed with much better performance. Flexible filaments (I tried a super-soft Shore A88 filament) are no issue at all.
I adapted a mount I found online, I’ll put my modification up somewhere if anyone is interested.
Never going back to Bowden.
All other similar extruders (super light Nema14 motor, dual large gears) should perform similar.
I got mine on trianglelab.net, so directly from the manufacturer. Stats-wise it’s pretty close to the LGX Lite. I went for the TBG Lite, because it was a bit cheaper and the gears are enclosed, which I imagine reduces the dirt that gets in there.
There’s a whole bunch of similar extruders, that all use Nema14 steppers (introduced afaik by the Orbiter extruders) and dual large extruder gears (introduced afaik by the Prusa Nextruder).
They all are very similarly specced (same motors, same gear ratio, same extruder gears) and I imagine they should perform pretty similarly.
Thanks! That’s pretty interesting. If my stock extruder breaks (the plastic one from the Ender3) I’m going to replace it with one of those. So for I really like the Orbiter.
I was gonna go for the Orbiter, but the large gears are supposed to be a big upgrade. I don’t have an Orbiter, so I cannot compare.
That comparison would be interesting. From what I’ve gathered all of these use larger gears than the typical 8mm:
(Source, Section Gear Diameter and TBG Product Page)
Oh, didn’t know that. I thought, the Orbiter used 8mm gears, but that might have been the Orbiter v1 or I might be totally wrong.
All I can say is that the TBG Lite has tons of holding force. I haven’t had any slipping/grinding at all so far.
It also handles flexible filaments really well.
A friend of mine uses the Orbiter v2 and is really happy with it as well, but it’s really hard to compare two extruders that both work great on two different machines using different filament.
I would venture to say that both will probably work great and will only differ in extreme circumstances.
In my case, the extruder is now not the limiting factor on my printer any more, but instead the melting process is. I tried high-flow nozzles (the type that splits the filament into three sections to melt faster) before swapping to the TBG Lite extruder, and there was no difference, because the stock Ender 5 extruder was crap and limited the print speed.
I guess, now with the TBG Lite, a high-flow nozzle might actually be useful.
Oh no, that’s the trouble with upgrading. The weakest part limits your printer, when you upgrade that, you’ll need to upgrade the next weakest one and so forth…
The creator of the Orbiter published some tests on his page and from what I understand is that once you reach a certain nozzle pressure, either the extruder skips or the the filament grinds. The tests were made with a Dragonfly HF, so I guess if I want to reach the extremes where is a difference between the extruders, I need an entirely different printer :P
That is a fair argument. I just read that the large gears are mainly a benefit for flexible filaments. I only ever printed flexibles on the stock extruder of my old Tronxy X8 and on the Ender 5 with the TBG Lite. The TBG Lite is much better, but that was expected. I can’t say whether it performs better than an Orbiter v2. I just can say that the TBG Lite performs flawlessly with shore A85 filament. I don’t even have to reduce the print speed from what I use for PLA/PETG.