Which is the strongest 3D printing Extruder?
Even though extruders for 3D printers only need to push the filament into the hotend they come in many different forms and shapes. Everyone knows the most basic feeders from Ender printers with a single gear directly on the stepper shaft. But there are a ton of more advanced extruders, with dual gears next to each other, dual gears in parallel, small extruder gears, large extruder gears, and even one that pushes filament forward with a belt. All of that driven with large stepper motors, small steppers, planetary gearboxes, or even worm drives. I gathered a bunch of them over the years and tested all of the for their pushing force and extrusion consistency! Why? Well, for ages, I’ve had a project on my mind, which is small-scale injection molding using 3D printer. If you are intrigued by this idea, then don’t forget to subscribe to not miss that project. Anyways - for injection molding, it’s very important to be able to push the molten material with a lot of pressure into the mold so that it’s able to reach even the smallest cavity. Yet crazy projects like injection molding using a 3D printer are not the only reason why strong extruders are important. 3D printers' kinematics have been becoming faster and faster in the last couple of years and if you want to print quickly, you need to push a lot of material with a consistently high force into the nozzle. On the other hand, the extruder, which is often the heaviest part of the hotend, reduces the maximum allowable accelerations, so it also needs to be lightweight.
Tested Extruders (affiliate)
Bondtech BMG: https://geni.us/oUch
E3D Hemera: https://geni.us/6lV8
E3D Hemera XS: https://geni.us/1bHnP
Orbiter 2.0: https://geni.us/A9STI
Mellow Cannon (new version): https://geni.us/6VGL
Bondtech LGX: https://geni.us/xrTN
Dropeffect OmniaDrop (V3): https://geni.us/7dMS9h
Dyze Xtruder Pro: https://geni.us/fcr8l5h
Proper Extruder: https://geni.us/DlA6
OMG V2 Extruder: https://geni.us/vGJG
The test setup is quite simple and is partly inspired by what Adam from Vector3D and Thomas Sanladerer did in the past. I mount the extruder onto a frame and guide the filament into a free-standing hotend assembly that has a load cell at the bottom. Since the hotend and extruder are not directly connected, the force that’s generated when the filament is pushed through the hotend will be reacted through the scale that I sample 10 times a second using an Arduino board. My first idea was to directly do all of these tests on my highly modified Ender-3 rig with the tool plate change system from WhamBam but the extrusion forces were so high that they just deformed everything and lead me to quickly design this wooden rig that I routed out on my Mekanika EVO CNC router.
Strength Test Setup
The Mosquito Magnum Hotend that I used acts as a variable load. Depending on the hotend temperature that I set, the viscosity of the molten material will be different, so at lower temperatures, it will take more force to push filament through the nozzle than at higher ones. This way, I can test the maximum pushing force of an extruder at different speeds because stepper motors have an rpm-dependent torque. The faster they go the less torque they’re usually able to generate.
Hotend with Extruded Plastic
Ender 3 Extruder
So let’s start with the simplest one, the extruder from my old Ender-3. It uses a simple brass gear and an idler on the other side and there is no adjustment of the tension. Since it doesn’t use any gearing, it needs a beefy NEMA17 stepper motor that I ran at 1A peak current as per the data sheet. The extruder parts themselves are very light, with only 31g, but if we want to compare it with the other ones later and add the stepper motor, a hotend, and two fans, we end up with a system weight of 386g. I first started at 5 mm³/s extrusion rate. First, the extrusion force jumps up, and stays constant for a bit, while the already molten material gets pushed out of the nozzle and then starts rising again, once new, cool material is fed into the hotend which will not be as thoroughly molten, as the material, that sat already in there for a while. Then I turn the heater off, which results in a rise in extrusion force until in this case, the gear started grinding the filament and we reach the maximum extrusion force. I always ran the test twice and the average maximum extrusion force for the Ender-3 one was 2.8 kg. At 20 mm³/s, which I could only achieve by increasing the nozzle temperature to 250 °C, the maximum force of the first peak was with 2.8 kg, basically the same, only the drop-off was a bit different.
5 mm³/s (blue) & 20 mm³/s (orange)
Bondtech BMG
Next, I tested Bondtechs BMG extruder the OG dual gear extruder which is probably the most copied design on Aliexpress and if it wasn’t the whole extruder then you’ll find BMG gears almost everywhere nowadays! The dual extrusion gears are connected by a set of spur gears and push the material from both sides for more force on the filament. The body is SLS printed PA12, weighs 91g, and sells for 96 €. If you add a stepper motor that’s 3:1 reduced and hotend the whole system weighs 446 g. With double the gears, the BMG was able to push 6 kg at 5 mm³/s until the gears started grinding the filament and a little lower 5.5 kg at 20 mm³/s extrusion speed. By the way, this is a more scientific approach on such a test, but Proper Printing did a Extruder Tug of War last year, which you should also definitely watch after this!
Bondtech BMG: https://geni.us/oUch
Bondtech BMG
E3D Hemera
The next extruder on my bench was E3Ds Hemera extruder, which I’ve been using with great success over the last few years. The Hemera is very compact because the extruder housing also acts as a heatsink, so you can directly screw in the old V6 components from the bottom, use it with E3Ds new REVO system or even use it in a bowden configuration. The Hemera has dual drive gears similar to the BMG but applies a different diameter and tooth profile. The tension can be adjusted via a knob but there is nothing to turn the gears in order to feed filament by hand. Yet if you pull the tensioning lever all the way back you can barely disengage it from the filament and push the material in by hand. The standard Hemera comes with a beefy stepper motor and weighs, including a hotend, 380 g, and the whole system will set you back 190 €, yet this includes a full REVO hotend which is worth around 90 €. The data sheet claims up to 12 kilos of pushing force, so let’s see how it really did! The extrusion force was nice and constant and rose up all the way to 10.2 kg at normal extrusion speeds which is quite remarkable. At 20 mm³/s it wasn’t as good but still reached 7 kg. Both times the filament stripped, so the motor itself is plenty strong.
E3D Hemera: https://geni.us/6lV8
E3D Hemera
E3D Hemera XS
And this is also why I was super stoked when I saw that E3D released the XS version of the Hemera last year, with a smaller pancake stepper that strips almost 30% or 100 g of weight from the extruder. It still costs 190€ including a REVO hotend and I do have the feeling that it will replace the regular Hemera because it’s the only one still listed on E3Ds website. Let’s see if it performs the same! At regular speeds, the XS was a little weaker and was able to push 8.5 kg strong. At high speeds, this dropped to 6.5 kg. The interesting thing here is that the filament didn’t strip, but the motor skipped, which is a behavior you want on an extruder because this increases the chance that the print can recover once the filament can flow again. This is nicely visualized if we compare the force curves between the Hemera that strips the filament and can barely push anything anymore at some point, whereas the XS retains quite a high pushing force. In summary, if maximum force is not what you’re looking for, I think the XS is in every regard better than its thicker brother and a great extruder.
E3D Hemera XS: https://geni.us/1bHnP
E3D Hemera XS (left) VS the regular Hemera
LDO Orbiter 2.0
So let’s come from the beefy boys to the super lightweight extruders and start with the Orbiter 2.0 manufactured by LDO. The most obvious difference is that it uses an even smaller stepper motor, which has been becoming very popular even on other designs. The housing of the Orbiter is injection molded Glass Reinforced Nylon which makes it very stiff and feels super nice. It uses a planetary gearbox with a 7.5:1 reduction to drive the dual Bondech extrusion gears. The 690 steps per mm allow very precise dosing of material yet will need the motor to spin faster. Due to the popularity of the Orbiter, there is a huge ecosystem around it with tons of mounts for different printers and hotends. The extruder costs 69€ locally and weighs in at 152g yet requires a hotend with a heatsink which brings the system weight to 212g. But let’s see how much this small form factor extruder can push! The Orbiter had a very consistent extrusion force and was able to push 7.2 kilos at normal speeds and 6.8 kilos at 20 mm³/s. Both times the motor skipped showing how well the system is tuned. Just on a side note here - if you’re a tech geek and interested in extruder design, I highly recommend reading the story of the Orbiter 2, which details every design decision they made and is just pure gold!
Orbiter 2.0: https://geni.us/A9STI
LDO Orbiter 2.0 VS Hemera XS
Mellow Cannon
Let’s now take a look at a very similar yet also very different extruder. This is the Mellow Cannon extruder, which at first glance could be mistaken for an Orbiter but has two very unique design features. First, it uses very big extruder gears, similar to what I think Bondtech came up with in their LGX extruder. This increases the contact area of filament and gear and should result in less slip and higher extrusion forces. Secondly, it is the only extruder that I’ve seen so far that uses a worm gearbox. Worm gears have the advantage that you can achieve very high gear reductions in a small space, here 19.5:1, but due to friction in the worm gears is very inefficient, so will convert a lot of the motor torque into heat instead of pushing force. And it comes with another inconvenience and this is that you cannot back drive it, which means that you can’t feed filament by hand at all. You can unscrew the tension arm but that’s inconvenient and I would love to see a latch feature as you can, for example, find it on the Clockwork 2 extruder. Mellow sent me the first version of the Cannon extruder, which partly wasn’t assembled correctly and also was too tight in some places, where I had to sand down some details, yet there is now an updated version that hopefully improves on some details. The Mellow Cannon is slightly cheaper and slightly lighter than the Orbiter at 65 € and 204 g, but let’s see how the performance compares! The maximum extrusion force I was able to achieve was 5 kg at normal speed and only 4 kg at higher speeds. Both times the motor skipped steps which shows the inefficiency of the worm drive if we compare it to the Orbiter. I do like the idea behind Mellows Cannon extruder but I think it still needs some tweaking until it can really compete with the Orbiter.
Mellow Cannon (new version): https://geni.us/6VGL
Mellow Cannon
Bondtech LGX
Now, it’s time to test the OG Large Gear extruder, Bondtech LGX. I really enjoy seeing Bondtech doing this kind of innovation. They made the Dual Gears popular and now try to go from the smaller gears to these large ones for extra filament contact. And they also make something else different than the rest and this is that the second extruder gear is not pushed onto the filament by a spring but fixed in predetermined locations with the adjustment lever, which basically mangles the filament through the gears, just like a sheet of dough through a noodle machine.I’m not sure if this approach is better or worse than a spring loaded system but I’d really like to hear your opinions here! The only thing I was able to see is maybe a bit more fluctuation of the extrusion forces, but only slightly. The LGX is a quite compact extruder with an SLS printed housing costing 119€, weighing 220g with the pancake stepper and 280g as a system with a hotend. Performance was okay with 5.4 kg of extrusion force at low speeds and 5.1 kg at 20 mm³/s. It’s definitely held back by the pancake stepper because both times, the motor skipped steps. For a test, I increased the motor current from the recommended 650 mA to 1 A, which made it reach 8.3 kg and it was still not stripping filament. So if you don’t require maximum feeding force, the LGX seems to be a reliable solution, but it won’t make it on the maximum extrusion force throne.
Bondtech LGX: https://geni.us/xrTN
Disassemble Bondtech LGX
Dropeffet OmniaDrop 2.1
Let’s now get to some more exotic extruders and start with the OmniaDrop 2.1 by Dropeffet, which is designed to extrude even the most flexible filaments, for which I used it very successfully in the past. The Omniadrop also uses a pancake stepper which connects to a 5:1 planetary gearbox and feeds into a dual-drive extrusion system. The body of the extruder is FDM printed and can therefore be adapted to a range of different mounts. It has a very short filament path and is cooled by a really interesting heat sink design. The Ominadrop 2.1 cost 149€ yet the new V3 only sells for 125€. The complete system weighs 330 g. At medium tension, it achieved 6.9 kg pushing force at 5 mm³/s and 6.2 kg at the faster speed. Both times the filament stripped. As a test, I increased the tension to its limit, which makes the teeth of the gears bite deeper into the filament and made me reach even more than 9 kg of pushing force until the extruder motor skipped, yet this felt very unhealthy for the tensioning lever and the 3D printed housing.
Dropeffect OmniaDrop (V3): https://geni.us/7dMS9h
Dropeffect OmniaDrop
DyzeXtruder Pro
Next, I put the DYZE Pro Extruder on the bench, another compact yet full metal extruder. I almost didn’t add it to the test because I thought it wouldn’t be any different than the other dual-drive extruders, but when I took a closer look at the actual extruder gears I got excited. They don’t use the usual hobbed gears for extrusion but have actual spikes on the gears that get pushed into the filament.
Spikes on the Extruder Gear
The rest of the extruder looks very solid with a really nice latching spring lever, yet no tension adjustment. This metal construction weighs in at 295 g for just the extruder and 358 g with the compatible hotend. Just the extruder costs a whopping 229 € plus an additional 149€ for the high temp hotend. But how does it perform? At the recommended 0.9 A peak motor current, it pushed 9.2 kg at 5 mm³/s and 6.2 kg at 20 mm³/s. Both times the motor was the limiting part. Over-amping it to 1.3 A made it even outperform the Hemera extruder with 13 kg pushing force until the motor again first skipped, so there is still potential left!
Dyze Xtruder Pro: https://geni.us/fcr8l5h
DYZE Pro Extruder
Proper Extruder
Another very exotic extruder that feeds filament like no other is the ProperExtruder, designed by YouTube college Jon from Proper Printing. This model uses belts to push the filament forward, which dramatically increases the surface area of feeder to filament contact. This not only doesn’t damage the material but also allows the printing of very flexible filaments. The whole body is SLA printed from resin, giving it this unique transparent look. As cool as it looks, this extruder is heavy, weighing in at 401g and a whopping 526g if you include a hotend and cooling solution! Unfortunately, you can’t buy this extruder pre-built, but if you are interested in the design, you can purchase the files for only 3€ on Jon’s website! When running the motor at 1.2 A I was able to push 6.2 kg at low speeds and 5.7 kg at high speeds until the stepper first skipped. Tuning it to 1.8 A increased the performance to 9.4 kg when still the motor was the bottleneck. I didn’t dare to go any higher because I didn’t want to break anything, but the belt-driven extruder principle seems to have quite some potential!
Proper Extruder: https://geni.us/DlA6
Proper Extruder
OMG V2 Extruder
Let’s now come to our final contestant, the OMG V2 extruder, for which I had really high hopes. Instead of having two active extruder gears on opposing sides of the filament, the OMG uses extruder gears in series. It is meant as a direct replacement for all the simple Ender and Creality CR extruders out there and provides more reliable extrusion performance. The OMG is a full metal construction with a gear ratio of 3:1. Both extrusion gears have a spring-loaded idler wheel opposing them. If you don’t want to order from China, the OMG was quite hard for me to get here in Europe, and I was very happy that the French store Imprimate3D provided a sample that usually sells for a reasonable 59 €. And even though it didn’t outperform the other contestants, it was able to push with 8.7 kg at normal speeds and 7 kg at the higher speed until the filament stipped. One great thing about this design is that the extrusion gears are accessible from the outside and allow easy cleaning.
OMG V2 Extruder: https://geni.us/vGJG
OMG V2 Extruder
But which extruder is now the strongest? Both the Hemera and DYZE Pro performed the best with the Hemera taking the throne in stock configuration. Overamped, the DYZE Extruder can push even more, due to its spike gears, and deserves credit for this design feature! Yet this doesn’t consider the overall weight of the extrusion system, which is crucial for speed printing. So if we take a look at the maximum extrusion force per weight, there is a new winner, the Orbiter 2.0 followed by the Hemera XS. Really interesting and confirms why the small Orbiter has become so popular on current printers. Also kudos to E3D for taking a great spot in both categories. If they could only make the Obxidian widely available and talk about a high-flow nozzle, I could finally recommend the Hemera plus REVO without any hesitation.
Extrusion Test Results
In the end, you’ll need to decide what is important for you. If you print with large nozzle diameters at reasonable speeds, extruder weight might not be as important, so simply look at the extrusion force. Yet for the next record-breaking Speed Benchy the force-per-weight winner might be the one to look out for! But what’s your opinion on the results I’ve presented? Do they confirm your experience, and what other extruders should I have included? Leave a comment below!
Tested Extruders (affiliate)
Bondtech BMG: https://geni.us/oUch
E3D Hemera: https://geni.us/6lV8
E3D Hemera XS: https://geni.us/1bHnP
Orbiter 2.0: https://geni.us/A9STI
Mellow Cannon (new version): https://geni.us/6VGL
Bondtech LGX: https://geni.us/xrTN
Dropeffect OmniaDrop (V3): https://geni.us/7dMS9h
Dyze Xtruder Pro: https://geni.us/fcr8l5h
Proper Extruder: https://geni.us/DlA6
OMG V2 Extruder: https://geni.us/vGJG