It’s pretty clear these gears wear down which i think is normal and will need to be replaced infrequently. Thanks for the post.
Let this column know how the helical gears turn out after they are installed and tested. Heads up i got some nozzles off ali express and they were not great, caused jams. Never ever using the ali nozzles again unless a trusted source verifies.
That an old post. Ive since tried all kinds of gears and went back to Bambu OEM. The bambu are now angled helical gears as well in the latest revision. I do have one aftermarket set installed in my P1s but I mainly use that for low temperature filaments. I find the aftermarket gear set with the aluminium arms retain heat more and cause jams from heat creep with high temp materials, so I stick to OEM on my X1. Basically the stock OEM is the best.
1 Like
1600 hours in. its still fine. no skipping or under extrusion. 
now ive done gone said it, so prolly will fail tomorrow 
1 Like
I just got a brand new OEM Bambu extruder replacement and the gears are not helical. How did you get these?
Its normal to get different revision of parts from bambu sometimes. nothing wrong with them. My X1 and P1s came with regular gears, my latest P1s came with helical gears.
Ive ordered some hot end fans and got the older 0.2A version even though its been a long time since they upgraded to 0.4A. They use different suppliers and have variations.
1 Like
I ended up ordering the Bambu OEM extruder assembly with gears, but since the shipping times were so long for me, I ordered the 3DHUB RNC Nano Coated Hardened Steel Extruder Gear Upgrade Kit off Amazon (probably the same white label mfr as your option from AliEx) which came much quicker. Installed it and I’m just printing with PLA for now and my prints are immaculate.
I will likely swap out this extruder with the after market gears, to the extruder with the OEM gears if I need to use any high-temp filaments to avoid heat creep issues.
Here is another post of mine, you can clean the stock gears pretty easily:
As Maximit says, BL have switched the gears to helical cut ones.
But I’ve just pulled my latest set of gears from my X1C. It’s done about 12,000 hours, and I reckon that this is the fifth set of extruder gears which have worn badly enough to show up as underextrusion and require replacement. In that time I have tried BLs stock gears, the hardened gears, straight-cut gears, helical-cut gears, and third-party gears. Same issue with each of them - after about 2,000 hours printing PLA 99.5% of the time) slight underextrusion creeps in; the gear teeth are worn (sometimes down to needles) and the inside of the extruder is very dusty.
I’ve taken to stripping, cleaning and regreasing the gears every 1,000 hours or so, but they continue to wear out (and faster than I would anticipate).
1 Like
I proactively replaced A1 gears on a machine that had 2500 print hours doing exclusively pla/petg. They looked great still. Your mileage may vary, probably incredibly dependant on your print behavior rather than your print hours. 100 hours of retraction torture test [or those airless basketballs that were trendy lol] is probably worth 1000 hours of simple printing. Same goes for abrasives vs standard
There is a new aftermarket gear set that just came out on Ali and I ordered. […] Have not tried it yet as it’s still on the way.
How did this work out for you? It does seem like the plastic gears should be prone to wearing if one uses abrasive filaments, and this might extend the service life.
I’m still baffled as to how many of us can burn through these gears in 1-2,000 hours, and yet some people report that they are on the original gear set at 6,000 hours or more with no visible signs of wear; my gear teeth are like little needles by 3,000 hours.
It’s not down to what filament is being used - I do 99.5% of my printing in PLA, and never use CF or GitD filaments.
But I print a lot of detailed, multicoloured pieces (often at small layer heights), meaning there are a lot of retractions taking place - rather than printing large simple shapes that would involve the constant and steady extrusion of filament. Might this be the answer, I wonder - that the frequent changes of extruder direction is what kills these gears?
All I know is that something that wears so quickly (i) ought to be made of something more hardwearing, and (ii) ought not to be hidden under 9 screws and four delicate connectors if BL think that we should be inspecting, greasing and replacing it regularly.
Heck, I have replaced about three times as many extruder gears as I have nozzles, and they are clearly designed with swapping in mind 