In this article I will be reviewing the Flex3Drive extruder system custom fitted for the Tevo Black Widow.
DISCLAIMER – To be 100% h
onest I purchased the Flex3Drive on my own, and was going to do the design work myself and get it working on my Tevo Black Widow. Flex3Drive was gracious enough to work with me (even though they had no Black Widow to work with) to design all the mounts needed to fit the system to the printer. Also in the pictures you will see my custom printed clear ABS system. The system I purchase was in black ABS.
The Flex3Drive extruder system is a flex shaft remote motor system that has a 40:1 gear ratio, compatibility with a wide range of hot ends (JHead/E3D/Pico/Buda and more), fully contained filament force path, available with any length driveshaft from 650mm upwards, to name a few of the bells a whistles this system has.
Flex3Drive Unboxing
Flex3Drive came nicely packaged and even came with some extra parts, which I thought was a nice touch. The parts are printed in ABS and if you didn’t tell me they were, I would have never known they weren’t produce in a factory. With a 3D printed system you might think you’d get that type of feel, but the very opposite everything is very professional and the system feels that way.
Support by Flex3Drive
As mentioned above Flex3Drive worked with me and designed all the mounts to fit the Tevo Black Widow, which really save me a ton of time and effort getting this system up and running.
Print Cooling for Flex3Drive
I designed a print cooling shroud for the system which I am pretty proud of, as it has adjustable height. Since I’m using an E3D V6 and there are many heads for it, I wanted it to work for them all and think my solution is nice and simple. You can get the Flex3Drive cooler here. And later it will also be up on Thingiverse. Print the Plate.stl at 20% infill and the Cooler at 100% infill.
Also the support Flex3Drive gave me was outstanding, from making the correct changes to the firmware along with any questions I had they were right there every step of the way.
The system itself was easy to set up. And not having the extruder motor on the X carriage and this small system with just the E3D V6, it made the X carriage crazy light! This with fine tuning will equal faster and higher quality prints.
Amazing first Layers – Flex3Drive stepped up my game!
Talking about quality prints, I’ve honestly never had such amazing first layers and every print is very high quality. I’ve made a small demo video of how nice the first layers go down, which you can check out here.
With the 40:1 ratio your extruder motor really doesn’t need to work hard, to point that your turn your vref down to .4 to .6. This equals to less wear on the motor making it last a very long time.
Loading filament is a breeze and it handled all types so far from Carbon Fiber to PETG.
I’ll admit I bought the Flex3Drive just by chance (more of the lets see if I can get this to work with my printer type of buy) and now with almost a month with the system I wouldn’t go back to any other type of extruder . With its ability to print anything, to the reliability of the system and all the other bonuses it has you just can’t go wrong.
Flex3Drive Extruder Cost
With that said the system isn’t low costing. At the current moment of writing this article the Flex3Drive system is around $85 USD without shipping, which while not hugely expensive it’s more than your average AliExpress titan clone.
The question is …..Was it worth it?
100%! I really do love this system, furthermore it has been well thought out, easy to install and the company has great customer service. From beginning to end this was a great experience and I’m amazed at what the Flex3Drive system has done for my Tevo Black Widow.
If you have another machine you can see on this list below which machine this system would fit on:
Flex3Drive Machine compability
- Almost All REPRAP style priters
- Rostock and other similar sized Delta printers
- Wanhao / Makerbot
- Core XY and HBot machines
- Obviously also TEVO Black Widow 🙂
- Prusa i3 MK2
- Kossel Mini and Kossel XL
- Ultimaker UMO – UM2 – UM2e – UM2+
- Airwolf
- All ungeared direct drive extruders
Flex3Drive Hotend Compability
- JHead
- Hexagon
- Buda Nozzle
- Prometheus v1 / v2
- E3D
- Volcano
- Pico
- Cyclops
Finally, If you’re interested in the system, you can find all the info at Flex3Drive.Com
Great Review! As I am the owner of a Tevo Black Widow as well, I look Forward to getting mine in as well.
Thank You, great info to have
Beware if you order a Flex3Drive, it might take months to get it. I ordered mine back in September and it’s now nearly 2 months later (11/16) and i’m still waiting for it to ship. I’ve contacted them at least 3 times and they just give me the runaround. The last time I contacted them, I asked if it would be shipping within the next month, and they acted surprised and said it would be “days, to a week”. That was 2 weeks ago.
You have described exactly what happened to me. For four months I waited and every single time I asked, they told me something like “next week” or so, even assuring. The product may be good but that’s not the way to treat customers. I would have prefer they told me to wait four months Instead of being constantly thinking I had been scammed.
My last contact with them was 2 weeks ago, and they (I assume it’s the creator, Mutley3D) told me again it would be shipping that week. I just now got an “Order Completed” e-mail from their online ordering system, so I would assume that means it’s shipping, but who the hell knows (there’s no tracking number or anything)?! So, from time of order to supposedly shipping, is 75 days. Shipping will probably take at least a week from there to the United States I would guess. So from time to order until product delivery, it’s going to be close to 3 full months.
I was already tempted to tell them to cancel my order and refund me. At 4 months, i’d be livid! I’m really concerned to see that others have had an even longer wait than me. Unacceptable. If you can’t deliver your product in a timely manner, then you need to state this beforehand so customers are aware before they order.
The fact that he kept stringing me along to make me think it’s going to ship out soon simply pisses me off and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The Flex3drive seems really cool! It gives a nice look to the printer too! I’ve heard the fans are pretty loud though. Have any of you had that problem? I am going to keep my printer in my room (being single allows me to do things like that 😉 haha ) But I don’t want to stay awake from the fans all night. I am also a bit concerned about the amount of time it takes to get the Flex3drive!! I don’t know about waiting 3+ months for a product after I spent the money for it. But then again what can I do? If I really want it I will just have to wait!
Yes we had a couple of issues on supply due to volume of orders at one point, all got a little chaotic, anyone with a growing small business will know it can happen, so sorry for any delays. things moving along nice now though. Keep an eye on our site as we have new things along all the time.
I ordered a kit to modify my old Ultimaker Original back in March and it still hasn’t arrived. After numerous emails to Jason, I just feel like I’m being fobbed off. So I’ve asked for my money back. No product is worth is this amount of hassle.
I have been looking into this flexdrive system for the last several months for my corexy machine.