IRobertI

Oh but then people would complain about the price. UM couldn't make it cheaper to buy a UM2 + upgrade instead of a UM3 (then they wouldn't sell any UM3s and UM3 owners would get pissed that they got screwed on price). So they have to make it more expensive, and then people would complain about that.

Yes, that's the price. And yes, more is coming. The nozzle can be unscrewed but it's not compatible with Olsson-style nozzles. And if you start taking the core apart you're on your own of course. I have no doubt after market parts will be made available by third parties. You will not be locked in. You can still use non-chipped filament without any issues (unless you count one or two clicks on the menu an issue ).

IIRC it's an Olimex A20 board.

No, there will not be an upgrade kit. And even if there was, you would not want to pay the price, as it would be very expensive because of the amount of parts you would need to replace. As well as the time needed to do all the mods to the mechanics. It's not just a matter of doing a head transplant. No one is more sorry than Ultimaker that dual extrusion never worked on the UM2. Of course they wanted to release it, that's how they make money. And they tried, they tried very hard and it just never worked well enough to be released (I tested a couple of prototypes and well... it didn't work very well). Yes, it sucks, but would you have been less angry if you got an upgrade that didn't work?

Where was it said that the UM2+ would have dual extrusion? "On the forum" is not good enough, I want a link. Why did you buy a printer that you knew couldn't produce the models your customers wanted from you? As others have pointed out, the difference between the UM2+ and UM3 is bigger than it looks. An upgrade kit just isn't economically sane to do considering how much you'd have to replace.

The blue lines are travel moves, they've always been there. If you post a picture of your print and point out what you're having trouble with in the actual print we might be able to help you figure out a solution.

That would be foehnsturm that posted just before you He has polished that design/approach quite a bit and he's getting excellent results from it.

The UM2+ is a fantastic printer. It has been the most reliable by far of the whole family for me (and customers). Sure the UM3 will bring some neat features to the table, but that doesn't negate that the UM2+ is a very good printer. You can do a lot without dual extrusion.

Could you be a bit more specific? "Sometimes it fucks up" isn't very helpful. Does it happen on all models? Does it happen at the same spots (z-height)? Does it happen with all materials? Have you noticed anything else besides what you took a picture of? etc

Looks like a translation of Ultimaker's manual: https://ultimaker.com/en/resources/20406-installation-cura-2-1

The UM2 heater is 25W while the UM2+ heater is 35W. The PID values for the 2+ firmware are tuned for this as well so you might see some more temperature fluctuations if you use your old heater (and it will be less powerful). If you have a multimeter you can check the resistance of the heater to make sure it's not dead.

I'm using a closed beta of cura so I'm not entirely sure if something may be different but I was able to get the object to fit when I set skirt lines to 0. With the default value of 2, it does not fit.

Ah, no retractions and 0.8 nozzle, that'll do it I need to do some tests myself, I have a spool of the stuff here which I haven't gotten around to using yet. Thanks for saving me some time on testing

Lots of good information in here. I see a fair amount of stringing, do you think this is just the nature of the material or something that can be tuned out?

Most likely it is the default build plate adhesion setting of "Brim" that is making your model too big. Go to advanced mode and check under "Build plate adhesion", change that setting to "Skirt" and reduce the "Skirt line count" to 0 to maximize space on the bed. If not all of those settings are available, hover over the header for that setting group and a small cog will appear to the right on the header. Click that cog and "Setting visibility" manager will pop up with those settings scrolled into view. Enable the ones you want and hit ok. When you change the adhesion setting you will see that the faint gray border around the buildplate will change size. As far as I know there is no way to change the direction. But you could try rotating the part to "trick" cura into putting the lines down the other way.

If you could take a couple of well lit pictures of the print, that would help a lot in figuring out what's going wrong.

Most likely caused by the small delay while retractions are happening like geert says. You might be able to get rid of it by lowering temperature a little bit, disabling retractions and increasing travel speed. You will likely get some stringing doing that but it might be that those are small enough that they are easier to remove than trying to get rid of the tiny blobs.

During a visit to UM a long time ago I remember that one of the material guys there talked about something related to this. He was doing strength tests on prints in different materials and one issue he was having was that if he printed a whole plate of parts he would see differences in strength between the samples. This is of course sort of expected due to the process but what he found was that it was consistently parts that where printed first that deviated from the parts that were printed last. So, to me, it sounds like something like this could work quite nicely. The only thing I'm wondering is if the plate would reach a high enough temperature for some materials. I'm not a materials expert so I don't know what type of temperatures you need, but that could be a limiting factor.

And just for future reference. You can also check for a metal plate behind the feeder. An upgraded machine will have the plate. Unless they took the effort to drill new holes of course.

Hmm... that's a weird one. Could you be over extruding slightly? In the middle of the print there's space for the plastic to retreat into the voids between the infill lines. On the top you have solid layers that could be causing the plastic to get displaced outward? Sounds very far fetched to me as well, I know, but it's the only thing my tired head can manage at the moment.

In addition to swapping to a TFM like valcrow suggests, I would also advice you to combine it with a fixed spacer from the UM2+ instead of the spring.

Did you change nozzle while the hotend was cold? You have to heat up the block when changing nozzles or leftover plastic will prevent the nozzle from screwing all the way in properly.

Not quite my latest print, but close. Figured I'd share it here in case someone found it useful. It makes it a lot easier to open the lever (and keep it open) on the UM2+ feeder. https://www.youmagine.com/designs/um2-lazy-lever

So the new TFM alone solved this for you? To be honest the TFM isn't what I would suspect in this case. The amount of extrusion looks fine. In fact, it looks like too much plastic is coming out which could indicate that the bed is too close to the nozzle. The bed also looks quite dirty. So my advice would've been a good cleaning of the glass and a re-level. Oh, and do you have a pic of the old TFM? Would be interesting to see what it looks like.

Very cool. Seems to be working fine on my end at least. Well, in so far as it re-orients parts to what looks like a good print direction at least. I took a couple of models that I had made, rotated them into an awkward orientation and let the plugin try and fix it. It rotated them back into the direction they were designed to be printed at, so it seems to be working And for those wondering how to install. Click the green "Download or clone" button towards the top right, download as zip and drag the "CuraOrienationPlugin-master" folder into: "C:\Users\YourNameHere\AppData\Local\cura\plugins"