Bicycorn Bowden Tube Setup

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Ever wondered if you could use the cable housing from your bicycle brake as a bowden tube on your 3D printer? Well, you can!

What started out as a silly idea turned out to actually work. So much so that it now replaces my Capricorn bowden tubing because the bicycle cable housing simply outperforms it. I've now created adapters from PTFE bowden tube to brake cable housing, from extruder to brake cable housing and from M10 threading (V5 hotend) to brake cable housing. Someone once said: "If it looks stupid, but works... it's not stupid"

!!!ONLY USE IN HOTEND WITH ALL METAL HEATBREAK!!!

If you want to insert the cable housing all the way into the hotend/extruder, first mount the adapter in the hotend/extruder. Then push some ordinary PTFE tubing as far in as possible and measure how far the tubing can be inserted. Then substract 10 mm from that number. The distance you're left with is the distance of plastic of the outermost layer of the cable housing you need to remove. Underneath you will find a spring that surrounds a PVC/PTFE liner. If you have measured everything correctly and removed the outer plastic layer, you can now insert the cable housing into the adapter and the stripped part of the cable housing bottoms out in the hotend/extruder.

If you don't want to insert the cable housing into the hotend or you don't have an all metal heatbreak, just cut some PTFE bowden tubing to length, couple it to the cable housing and insert the PTFE tubing as normal. The same can be done for the extruder (see images).

Some parts come in two varieties, standard and supportless. Ultimately, both are identical, but the supportless files contain either sacrificial layers (for an explanation of sacrificial layers, see here) or built in supports. If you've got your bridging settings dialed in, the supportless versions are a breeze to print.
I also added a second nut here, that is slightly smaller than the normal one in case it needs to be used in tight spaces.

I hope you have fun with this :)