Anet Et4 Mods - Filament Guide

Hey folks, TechNivers here. We got another ET4 mod coming at you. This time it is a filament guide. Now this little guy is going to control our filament and keep it from rubbing up against the intake for the sensor and rubbing that sensor raw. So don't want that to happen, stay tuned. It's again another easy mod, two simple screws, and I'll show you how to do it right now. All right, so here we are in Fusion 360. I wasn't satisfied with the model that I found, so I'm just gonna make my own here and we're gonna be quick and simple about it. So we're gonna grab a sketch, throw down on the bottom plane here. I know you're not gonna be able to see this too well down here in the corner, but this is the one that I printed. Just did not anything, didn't fit, screw holes were too big, slid right off, wasn't lined up right, all that good stuff. So I don't know why I'm lagging so badly here. 31 by 21.5. So if my computer ever catches up, this should be a real quick model. I'm going to pause this right here because it's agonizing. I'm going to knock it out real quick and then I'll just run you through the play button real quick because that should be a lot simpler. So hang on one second. All right, like I said, simple right? So let's run through this real quick. Basic sketch, a couple of chamfers, pretty easy. This is what we're gonna have. We're gonna export this to STL, throw it in Cura and throw it on the printer real quick. So let's take a look at this real quick and I'll show you why I'm gonna repair this because if you take a look, and I know this isn't the best quality video when I zoom in, but as I zoom in here, this is the filament runout sensor. And that little hole there is where you feed your filament in and where you see the top of it becoming oval instead of circular, it's just barely starting to get ground away. That's from the pressure of the filament being pulled upwards as it's held on the spool, as it's being pulled through the extruder by the geared extruder mechanism, it grinds against that corner and grinds it down. So we're just gonna put a little guide on there to kind of smooth that motion a little bit and see if we can reduce the wear and tear on that actual part. Now the part we're putting on is basically going to take that wear and tear instead of the filament sensor, but I don't have an STL file to print this exactly, so I can reprint the guide as many times as I want and it's pretty substantial and pretty thick, so it should stand up to what we're putting it up against. Let's jump over to Cura now and see that file. Alright, file complete. So now we can see what we're working with. As you can see it's nothing special, it's pretty small actually. And we'll slice it real quick. Let me grab the card for the printer. Looks like we're looking at a 19 minute print. That is pretty fast. Should go pretty quickly. Saved to removable driver's filament guide version 1. Alright, let's do this. Alright, so here you see the stuff starting to go down and we're not going to watch this whole print. We'll watch a minute or two of this first layer here, just to make sure that things are going down properly. Let it get the outline in, things like that. Everything's running pretty smoothly. That new fan we installed is working pretty well. It's not really having any effect on what you're seeing here, because obviously this is the first layer. The fan's not on yet, but looks like things are coming out nicely. Should start finishing up these perimeter runs here any second. And then crisscrossing to infill the first layer there. And there you have it. You can see it starting to fill. So let's go ahead and jump to the end. Alright, so basically this is really simple. What I need to do is remove these two. You can see my part on the bed there just finished up. I'm going to remove these two screws and they are pretty simple to remove. Now you don't need to bother. I'm just going to pick up some of my plastic mess here. You don't need to bother heating up the extruder to remove the filament, because we're not actually going to be taking off any part of this. We're just removing the screws and then we're going to reseat it and replace it. So basically, looks like it's going to be a good fit here. And there's a tiny little notch in there that will hold that in place and ensure that it guides the filament to where we want it to go. But it's also rounded, so there's no real friction. It'll rub against there a little bit, but it should be minimized by the shape, by the curve of the shape. So we'll get this other screw out of here. And I know it's hard to see with my fingers in the way, but you get the gist of what I'm doing. You'll be able to see it completed here in a minute. Get this last guy out of here. Struggling with it. There we go. All right, now we want to keep everything together. Just like I said, we're not replacing this cover. We are going over the top of it. Fits pretty well. Holes are lined up. I want to make sure the filament does go through the actual little notch there in the guide. And it looks like that's working out pretty well. I'm just going to replace these screws here. And once we've got those replaced, now we are going to screw it down into its proper position. I'm just going to feed these through and make sure that they're flush with the bottom of the filament sensor case here, so that when I line them up with the screw holes, they pretty much just go right in. Now, there's not that much of these bolts left to bite into the sheet metal, but it should be just enough for me to get down there and get a nice tight grip on things. There we go. That one's pretty well fastened. Let's get this side here and just kind of tighten them as much as we can without stripping anything out of there. All right, and that's going to be it for this one, guys. If you'd like to try this mod for yourself, I will put a link to the thing down below. And it's pretty simple. Those two screws, you don't even have to remove the filament, like I said, in order to install this on your machine. So, that being said, we will see you in the next one. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button, smash that like button, and don't forget to ring that bell. You get notifications for updates on future videos. Got plenty more mod videos for the ET4 coming at you. So, that way, you can get notified as soon as they are up and available for you to watch. Thanks, guys. As always, this channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. If you'd like to support the channel on Patreon, head over to www.patreon.com slash technivorous. That's going to be it for this video. As always, I am Technivorous, and thanks for watching. Don't forget to check out our main channel page, where we do a free giveaway for our subscribers every month. So far, we've given away things like a Capricorn PTFE tubing kit and spools of filament. So, the giveaway videos are always pinned to our main channel page. So, all you have to do is subscribe and leave a comment on the giveaway video for the current contest. Feel free to check out this video right here. YouTube picked it for my content just for you. And if you haven't already, you can hit the subscribe button right here. So, what are you waiting for? Become a Technivore now. Thanks again. Technivorous out.