IRobertI

The market was very different just a year or two ago. Back then Netfabb was THE slicer if you wanted great prints so people (including myself) paid for it. Today the situation is very different. Netfabb is still a very good slicer but the competition has caught up and in some regards surpassed it.

I just finished replacing my hotend last night. I couldn't get my thermocouple or heater out of the old block while cold, when hot they both slid out of there easily. So, maybe try heating it up (with the heater halfway in it'll still heat up) and try again.

Right, new head assembled and very briefly tested. Tentatively optimistic Took a while longer than I had hoped, had a couple of hickups, one involving soldering (due to how I mounted my extra fan I had to cut the cables and re-solder). I also managed to break my new mounting point for the extruder so I need to print a new one DOH! On the up side I noticed that one of the axes was ever so slightly bent so I took care of that (I suspected this going in so I checked) and now the head moves ever so slightly smoother, every little bit helps

I can't print as my machine is currently in little pieces but I can say that just grabbing a gcode-file and running it is unlikely to work all that well. Say they used 2.80mm filament and whoever wants to give it a go has 2.95mm filament it will not work. Also, a fine tuned machine isn't all about the mechanical side of things, tweaking settings in software plays a huge part as well.

Ah ok, gotcha. Then I should be good to go then. Not looking forward to this, pulling apart the head is annoying

My bowden pop fix finally gave out and I figured I should just go ahead and install the hot end upgrade that I've had for a while now. Looking at the instructions for assembly it looks like there has already been a new addition since I bought the upgrade kit (December 2012). There's now a new injection molded part that helps with the retention of the bowden. Since this is my main issue I naturally got a bit "worried" that I didn't have this part. How important is it? Could Ultimaker be persuaded to send me this part only (cheaply. I'm not paying 15 bucks or something for a cheap plastic part)? Unfortunately I caught this a couple of days after placing an order for new belts, otherwise it might've been possible to just pop one of those in the envelope.

Oh speaking of saving. I'm NOT a fan of programs overwriting files without prompting. I know you have very strong feelings about popups but in this case it's more than warranted to have one.

Did you check out the second bug I found with the infill?

Selection bug squashed. At least on my system

This is what I'm planning at the moment. I'm thinking it should be possible to add some thin rubber between the front part of the assembly and the case to at least reduce vibration a little. The mounting holes are bigger than needed to allow for adjustment (my current bracket is off centre a fair bit) and it should help "decouple" the bracket a bit more from the wood. Might even add tiny rubber washers on the inside of the case as well. No idea what to use though, old latex gloves? edit: I actually have a ton of rubber o-rings, those should work nicely. I should make a groove for a big one on the front. The yellow bits are brass standoffs that I'm currently waiting for.

I actually found that my machine got louder when I converted. Or maybe not louder, but it changed the pitch of the noise to a really annoying high pitch sound. I'm waiting for parts to change my brackets though and I hope that will help a bit. I'm also thinking of replacing the belts (they've stretched a lot over the year or so I've had the machine), I've ordered new pulleys and I'm thinking of changing to the banana bushings since mine are starting to crack. It'll be a bit of an upgrade I hope I also put the motors on the left and next to the feeder, seemed more logical and it's easy to just switch around the wires of the motors.

The permanent solution is to use the limit switches for homing before each print after having adjusted the bed to be perfect after homing the z-axis. This is the way all of these types of printers work and the precision is more than enough for this purpose. You may want to print this: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11033 to make it easier to adjust though. Also, unless you add homing switches in addition to the limit switches how do you propose the printer is supposed to know where it is before starting a print? I know using the limit switches for both purposes might not be the correct way of doing it in the world of "real" CNC machines but for our use it works just fine.

The hex value changes to 0xffL and the decimal changes between 0.998ish to 0.997ish.

Been tinkering around a bit more tonight and have a couple of reproducible bugs to report. Bug 1: - Add more than one copy of an object. - Enter expert settings - Change the wall thickness by deleting the number after the decimal point, BUT, do it slow. Do it so slowly that the engine gets caught between slicing two objects while the value is not correct (for example '0.'). This will cause steamengine to crash. Bug 2: Set infill to 100% and wall thickness to 0.4 and the object will be empty (at least it is displayed that way in cura). Set wall thickness to 0.8 and all is well. This is a random bug that I don't know the reason for. On my laptop I'm unable to select objects on the bed. A right click will only display the "Delete all" option. It works fine on my regular comp though. Also this error has popped up randomly, I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly what causes it. It has happened (rarely) on both computers: An error has occured during the 3D view drawing. IndexError: 'list index out of range' @ sceneView.py:OnPaint:696 @ openglGui.py:_OnGuiPaint:222 This might not be a bug but it's a bit weird. I've been printing a few 100% filled parts today and one thing I've noticed is that when it's doing the infil it will sometimes draw a diagonal line, do a quick travel back to the start of the line, start a new diagonal line, quick travel back etc. Then a few seconds later it will do standard infill where it extrudes plastic in both directions. I can't say I like the behaviour because it tends to scratch the surface a bit. Near overhangs the engine will put in more dense infill (which is good), however, it does this even when the infill is already set to 100% which results in unnecessarily jerky movements. The layer view seems really really sluggish for some reason. Sometimes slicing an object is faster than displaying the layers. Since I do a lot of layer checking after slicing stuff this gets a bit annoying. I'm sure this is very low on the priority list but I thought I'd mention it. The re-slice triggering seems a bit aggressive. Just opening a dialog, backing out without changing anything still causes a re-slice. Slicing is fast but I'm not sure I'm a fan of the "live slicing". It reduces responsiveness I think, especially on my oldish laptop. And, at the moment it causes the error in bug 1. Also, may I say that I absolutely love the "warp in" when adding objects It's so silly and pointless but I can't help but love it

What is preventing you from raising the last corner 0.5mm? Is the screw running out of threads? If that's the case, have you tried tightening every other corner a little bit more?

Eh, what the hell, put me down for a set of 8 (8 x 8 mm) too Certainly couldn't hurt.

Be glad you have them. Back when I got my printer we had to make due with scrap pieces to try and do the same job, it was a pain in the arse to say the least. Coincidentally I just modelled and printed out a similar looking thing just yesterday

It's used as a measuring stick to square up the axes.

Hah, what are the odds that I managed to download one version to my main comp and then just minutes later a new version to my lappy? That was indeed the reason it failed though, starts up just fine now. First impressions... faaast

Gave it a quick test just now. I can't seem to get it to run on my main computer but it does start up on my laptop. What kind of info do you need in addition to the following? Win7 (freshly updated) Intel i7 920 ASUS Radeon HD 4890 (the drivers here are old but I'm not keen on updating as it breaks another program I'm using) 6gigs of RAM Tried installing, uninstalling, re-installing, rebooting and uninstalling the previous version of Cura I had on there (13.03 which worked fine). When starting it I get the splash screen but then it just sits there until I click on it at which point it disappears and nothing more happens. The only process I can see starting up is pythonw.exe sitting steady at 36megs of RAM and no CPU usage until I click the splash and it disappears.

I wouldn't mind giving it a test if there are slots still available.

No, there is no official heated bed yet. You'd have to source parts for it and build it yourself. Are you sure you NEED it though? Lots and lots of us out there print without one.

The answer is that you may have to adjust both. The four screws on the bed make sure that the bed is level relative to the path of the head. The Z-limit switch in the back tells the printer where Z=0 is. Both have to be right.

Push down on the topmost part of the coupling and then pull the tube out. Remember to heat up the hotend before pulling out the filament Or if you want to be lazy simply feed some new PLA in there and keep printing.

Looks to me like printing with support would take care of the overhangs no problem, it's just a matter of amount of plastic and some tedious clean up after. Warping will of course be a big problem here if you don't have a heated bed. Does it have to be printed as one solid piece? How about slicing off the base, chop it into four parts and print those separately. Then print the rest of the house upside down. That way you'd only need support for the arch of the roof, the rest should be able to print on its own. This approach would probably need a bit of elbow grease cleaning up the top of the roof afterwards and there might be difficult to join the pieces for the base together cleanly.