MAJOR difficulty getting filament initial fed through extruder

I've been following this subject in various places for months and there appears to be no easy solution.
Advice I've been given is to cut the end of the filament at an angle and bend the filament towards the hole in the extruder, but I've also found that any form of assistance with a very thin screwdriver or metal rod to hold it in place seems to help a lot.
It's a knack we all have to learn or swap to direct drive. 🙂

Double gear extruder here, I don't see the problem  🤔 

@tundrwd I think everyone has met this issue when they change the filament. But I think it is not a technical issue. Cutting the end of the filament at a special angle to make the filament "Slide" into the hole is a good idea.

I usually aim at the Bowden tube hole manually, which makes me save more time and I think I could found the special angle easily.

@kevin yes - I do cut at the "special angle".  Problem is - at least for stock extruder is that as you feed it in, and hold the jaws open more, it INCREASES the angle towards the bowden tube hole.  The gear nearly obscures the hole - so it takes 3-4 hands to try to get a thin bladed knife in there and push the filament, while holding open the jaws, AND trying to push the filament in.

Something "flimsy" like TPU was a "nightmare".

The basic problem is the geometry of the gear and roller in the extruder.  Holding open the jaws makes the gear almost obscure the hole entirely.

@tundrwd I understand your meaning and can not agree more about the opinion related to TPU filament. But as I said, this is not something technical but "skills", better to say tricks. 
Holding the jaws to put the filament near the hole and then slightly loosen it to make the cusp of the filament into the hole is important. Anyway, Practice makes perfect, Good luck!

Well, poo!  I had hoped someone had a "just loosen that a bit and move and..."  kind of advice.

Does having dual geared extruder help with this?  Do the gears feed the filament straight across to the hole for the bowden tube?

@tundrwd When feeding filament through standard lever it forces the filament tight against the bearing.

When feeding trough the dual gear extruder it has play on both sides, so easier to aim to the hole.

@3nderuser ok - thanks!  I wondered.  So many upgrades, and seeing some - I'm simply not interested at this point.  First 3D printer - so experimenting.  Tried TPU instead of PLA (obviously), and am now working on changing layer settings.  Trying to get finer layers.

Honestly, I don't know if I'm just lucky, but my 0.2mm layers look better than a LOT of stuff I see on YT.  I can't believe that a V2 is that significantly better than an Ender 3 or an Ender 3 Pro, Prusa, etc.

@tundrwd Well, it's just a hobby and many upgrades are real cheap, so why not. I came across topics about plastic standard extruder lever breaking and didn't want to wait for that to happen.
For some people mediocre is good enough and they just don't look further on how to improve things. Modifying the printer to get the best results is also part of the hobby, not only printing things.

Hi

New to 3D printing and after month of trials I entered this website to learn more and probably upgrade the firmware to allow for bed leveling/ i read the problems you report regarding the filament loading and i had/ have the same. some time the filament just bended outside . so now what works for me is cutting the filament at about 60 deg, reovinf the knovb to ba able  to see better and if it does gio through give the fikamanet a twust in order to change the angle

Moshe