Ender 3 and the CR Revo

Last May I took the leap into the Revo ecosystem, and upgraded my Prusa Mini. The nozzles aren’t cheap at $25 each, but the convenience of changing the nozzles, and the design to eliminate clogs in the hotend really does make it worth it.

I started having some thermistor errors on my original Ender 3, that had been upgraded to a Micro Swiss all metal hotend and direct drive extruder. This gave me a perfect excuse to try the CR Revo. Upon initial research online, it looked like the CR Revo would be a simple drop-in replacement, even with a Micro Swiss all metal hotend and direct drive setup, and I would get the benefits of the Revo quick change system.

The CR Revo ships with 5 butt splice connectors to ease the installation process. However, to me, this seems a little kludgey. If you’re an individual who is going to take on installing a new hotend on your 3D printer, you probably aren’t afraid of running some new wires to your board. If you opt to use 4 butt splice connectors, they will need to live somewhere in your wire loom and not look very clean in the end. Thankfully, E3D also supplies full length wires so you can run new wires directly to the board. However, the thermistor connector for the board, is not a JST connector, so it doesn’t stay put and is easy to pull off.

After removing the old Micro Swiss hotend, and using the existing wires to pull the new wires through the wire loom, the CR Revo was really a drop in replacement! Everything fit perfectly and the hotend shroud I use (modded Satsana) fit right over the Revo. The wires coming off the Revo hotend do need to be pushed slightly to the back to make room for the cooling duct, but they have a little wiggle room and it doesn’t add a lot of strain.

Once setting up the new Z-Offset for the new nozzle/hotend, I was up and printing in no time. Overall, I am really happy to have a Revo on my old Ender 3. I definitely recommend upgrading your Ender 3 hotend to a CR Revo if you have a chance. I’m looking forward to trying out a hardened version of a Revo nozzle in the future.