PTFE Bowden Tube – Warning
A Bowden setup can be a great thing to remove weight off of the extruder. However, there are some drawbacks. Here is one of the biggest misconceptions about Bowden tube. Just because it’s blue, does not mean it’s name brand or superior to a Teflon Bowden tube.
If you get on the forums and 3D print chat discussions, you will see one of the top recommended upgrades is to move to Capricorn PTFE Bowden tube. Why is this such a knee-jerk reaction when we see Teflon Bowden tubes? Well it all comes down to marketing. You’ve been convinced that if it’s not blue, it’s not worth it. Well, that is so far from true.
There is nothing worse than being hours into a print and it having a failure due to a clog or a jam in your Bowden tube. There are a number of reasons that these can happen and I am going to talk about the one we most likely hear about the least. Improperly or poorly manufactured Bowden tube. I fell into the rabbit hole of jumping on every printer upgrade I could when I first started with Bowden style printers. Why did I upgrade the Bowden tube? Because the community convinced me that what came with my printer was going to fail, and from the inference, it would happen often. So I jumped on a few deals that I saw online and got two different ‘blue’ PTFE tubes yo “upgrade” my printers.
The first printer that I upgraded was with a package that came with the full set of parts needed, the flush cutter, and a neat Capricorn sticker. Note that I said sticker. The second printer that I upgraded with a similar set. However, this set did not come with a sticker, it came with a little printed card that said Capricorn. I did not think anything of it at the time. After a few weeks I started to have issues with the second printer that I upgraded. I spent several hours trying to track down the issue. Only by chance did I notice that the blue Bowden tube felt odd near the hot end. I removed the tubing and noticed that the filament was not smoothly running through the tube when I tried it manually. After tracking down the soft spot, I cut the tube just at that spot, only to reveal that the tube was defective.
As you can see, hole in the center of the tube is in fact, not in the center of the tube. This was not due to wear, as the tube/print did not have nearly enough time for that type of reaction. There was about 30 hours of print time on this tube, and most of it was failures.
Despite this tube being marketed as high quality Capricorn tubing, I am left believing that this is simply a cheap knock-off product. After this occurrence, I put the Teflon (white) Bowden tube back on that printer, and it has been there for almost a year with no issues at all.
So when you are looking at upgrades, make sure they are necessary, and using real quality parts. Be careful of the shady marketing practices of some companies. If you buy your parts on a site like Amazon, make sure you look at whom you are buying from. Places like Amazon are marketplaces for many sellers, so product XyZ may be sold by five different sellers (Amazon themselves may be in that list). Check out the seller’s history, and if they have only been selling for a short period of time… buyer beware!
