konrad

I wonder if spirit level tis precise enough to measure such small (<0.1mm over 200mm) variations. And it will work if X-Y plane of hot end movement is perfectly horizontal which might not be the case due to several reasons. Anyway I haven't tried this trick and I will give it a try. That surely is precise but it takes a long time. One issue is that nozzle must be clear and this means it must be cold to prevent dripping. Somebody mentinoned here that while hot the hot end expands slightly. That will influence Z homing settings set with foil trick (but not the levelling itself). I do something similar with just a piece of paper - I put it between (hot) hot end and bed and just slide it and adjust screws. If I can slide it with just moderate force the nozzle-bed gap is just right. But that needs to be repeated four times, needs practice and have limited accuracy. I love simplicity of the two lasers setting described in the link in my firt post and keep wondering if this can be done with X-Y stationary bed.

Here is an interesting approach to bed levelling http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16138. Obviously it works with movable platform and stationary hot end. I need to re-level my bed quite often and the routine takes relatively long time. I wonder if similar laser system can be used with UM to make it easer/quicker. Any ideas?

That is very true - with bigger building platform AND more mass on it you will need more Z shafts to keep it strictly horizontal. I imagine that having 2 or more Z shafts would requie belt(s) to connect them (just like X/Y shafts are connected now). While increasing envelope size at some point it might be more feasible to vertically move the whole extruder X/Y system with 3 motors, shafts and everything rather than building platform. That's what those guys did: http://lebigrep.org/ But that would require a major redesign. I wonder how long would it take to extrude 1kg of plastic. Weeks? A bigger nozzle diameter might help a bit here but still it would take several days depending on layer height. Just remember to count into the budget cost of a UPS unit

3d systems is buying other companies as if they were donuts lately http://fabbaloo.com/blog/tag/3d-systems The other major (plastic) 3d printing companies competing are Object, Stratsys and Eos but I believe they are much smaller than 3d systems now. What worries me is that you can't really see much of a drop in prices for commercial 3d printing technologies over past years. In fact prices even increased last year. And monopolies don't help here.

I'm looking to replace my bowden tube. I have one of the older heads and despite all efforts every 20 hours of printing at 200mm/s bowden tube is poping out. I suspect that the blue-white thingy has weared by now and I plan to replace it by custom solution. In the meantime constant cutting of few milimeters off the tube left it almost too short. I would like to buy replacement before it really is too short to work. Do you know any place (preferably in Europe) that sells low quantities of PTFE tubing? There is no problem to buy 10 meters of it but I can't find anybody who could sell, say, 1 meter.

One of my short belts has signs of wearing on edges. As Daid said it was caused by pulleys - just a few hours of printing with unaligned pulleys left visible marks.

Agreed - that's why google group is still alive. But I think in the long run forum is better solution for topic organization and readibility. The best of both world would be if forum subscription feature send full post text instaed of just post notifications. A simple forum plugin can do the trick.

Hi Makerswamp, Sometimes cleaning stringing residures takes longer than printing itself. I use Paul&Florian's (great) settings with small changes. And those settings have all antioozing parameters in material definitions/jumps section zeroed. Sure low temp settings decreases ooze but doesn't eliminate it. It would be great to see this updated and have ooze-free printouts. As to the problem you described I assume you play with push-on speed, pull-back speed and travel RPM settings. And push-on does not extrude enough material after the jump. Right? Netfabb's very laconic manual here http://wiki.netfabb.com/Material_Settin ... for_RepRap says: I started to wonder what does it mean "before" and "after" the jump. For how long are those RPMs executed? After all the jump is executed immediatly after extrusion ends. I thought that maybe that is the time when Z-Jump is executed? So if the Z-offset is set to zero pull-back and push-on are effectively ignored and only travel RPM works. To verify this I created in Netfabb two small cubes with a gap between them to make jumps and generated g-code (standard quality, hollow object) for them with the following settings: Jump speed 180mm/s z-jump speed 20 mm/s pull-back speed 400 RPM z offset 1mm push-on speed 400 RPM Travel RPM 0 RPM The result for one of the middle layers: (begin layer 30 at 2.250)G1 X35.0000 Y12.0900 Z2.6800 F232.0000 E690.9806 G1 X35.0000 Y12.0900 Z3.1800 F232.0000 E690.9806 G1 X30.3400 Y12.0500 Z3.1800 F7800.0000 E690.9806 G1 X26.1151 Y12.0214 Z3.1800 F7799.9995 E690.9806 G1 X26.1151 Y12.0214 Z2.7100 F223.0000 E690.9806 G1 X26.1151 Y12.0214 Z2.2500 F223.0000 E690.9806 G1 X30.7900 Y12.0300 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E692.0870 G1 X30.7900 Y16.7100 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E693.1946 G1 X26.1100 Y16.7100 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E694.3022 G1 X26.1100 Y14.6200 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E694.7968 G1 X26.1100 Y12.0300 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E695.4098 G1 X26.1100 Y12.0300 Z2.7500 F232.0000 E695.4098 G1 X26.1100 Y12.0300 Z3.2500 F232.0000 E695.4098 G1 X30.7800 Y12.0600 Z3.2500 F7800.0000 E695.4098 G1 X35.0049 Y12.0886 Z3.2500 F7799.9995 E695.4098 G1 X35.0049 Y12.0886 Z2.7500 F232.0000 E695.4098 G1 X35.0049 Y12.0886 Z2.2500 F232.0000 E695.4098 G1 X39.6800 Y12.0900 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E696.5162 G1 X39.6800 Y16.7700 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E697.6238 G1 X35.0000 Y16.7700 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E698.7314 G1 X35.0000 Y14.6800 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E699.2261 G1 X35.0000 Y12.0900 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E699.8391 (begin layer 31 at 2.330) You can clearly see z-offset before and after the jump (Z2.2500 -> Z3.2500 and back). But correct me if I'm wrong: extruder did not pull any filmanet. Pull-back value was ignored! I did the same code for no z offset with the same result - no fiament retracting. The only way I could make E values decrease was to set negative Travel RPM. At Travel RPM = -2 RPM code looks like this: (begin layer 30 at 2.250)G1 X35.0000 Y12.0900 Z2.6800 F232.0000 E407.8387 G1 X35.0000 Y12.0900 Z3.1800 F232.0000 E407.6720 G1 X30.3400 Y12.0500 Z3.1800 F7800.0000 E406.1186 G1 X26.1151 Y12.0214 Z3.1800 F7799.9995 E404.7103 G1 X26.1151 Y12.0214 Z2.7100 F223.0000 E404.5536 G1 X26.1151 Y12.0214 Z2.2500 F223.0000 E404.4003 G1 X30.7900 Y12.0300 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E405.5067 G1 X30.7900 Y16.7100 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E406.6143 G1 X26.1100 Y16.7100 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E407.7219 G1 X26.1100 Y14.6200 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E408.2165 G1 X26.1100 Y12.0300 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E408.8295 G1 X26.1100 Y12.0300 Z2.7500 F232.0000 E408.6628 G1 X26.1100 Y12.0300 Z3.2500 F232.0000 E408.4962 G1 X30.7800 Y12.0600 Z3.2500 F7800.0000 E406.9395 G1 X35.0049 Y12.0886 Z3.2500 F7799.9995 E405.5311 G1 X35.0049 Y12.0886 Z2.7500 F232.0000 E405.3645 G1 X35.0049 Y12.0886 Z2.2500 F232.0000 E405.1978 G1 X39.6800 Y12.0900 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E406.3043 G1 X39.6800 Y16.7700 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E407.4119 G1 X35.0000 Y16.7700 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E408.5195 G1 X35.0000 Y14.6800 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E409.0141 G1 X35.0000 Y12.0900 Z2.2500 F1200.0000 E409.6271 (begin layer 31 at 2.330) Fiament is retracted during the jump. But since there is no push-on after the jump extrusion starts with smaller E values than before the jump and thus with void in the nozzle. That would explain the situation you describe, wouldn't it? It's late and I might be missing something huge but it seems that push-on and pull-back settings are ignored altogether. That would be bug that makes restart of extrusion after a negative travel RPM jump impossible :-( Can anybody check my reasoning? On top of that there is no comb feature in Netfabb - that makes stringing even worse. Edit: Only after writing the above I found confirmation from noone else but Paul http://groups.google.com/group/ultimaker/browse_thread/thread/7511401e952b586c/2c7df6ff0e8dca94?show_docid=2c7df6ff0e8dca94&pli=1. Note to self: use more Google BEFORE. It wouldn't hurt, though, if Netfabb manual didn't describe features that aren't implemented/are not working.

Some time ago I started to learn Blender to modify/create printable objects. It took a day or so to adjust to strange interface but after that I am pretty happy with what I can do. At the same time I feel I use 10% of it's features so my experirnce is limited.

My wife can't sleep if UM works next room (one door in between). But if I move UM so that there are 2 doors between UM and sleeping room you can't really hear anything even during quitet of the night and with UM working at 250% of nominal speed. I doubt if neighbors will ever notice the machie unless it falls down from my desk

It needed some postprocessing but I finally made it :-) http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:15681

Does anybody have successful ABS profiles? I haven't tried anything yet, but I'm running out of PLA for the moment and have a lot of ABS to play with. Is it possible to just use one of PLA profiles and just increase temperature? If so how much more temperature could be fine?