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I have seen that, Whilst it's nice to have a twin duty machine that can both add and cut material, I don't really see the benefits at this time to use both processes in tandem. Perhaps if you need to clean up a few holes, but in reality most engineering parts can easily be designed within the limitations of the traditional CNC and billet stock - and the results will be faster, cheaper and easier to produce and the mechanical properties far more reliable and robust (at the current state of technology). If you had an application where there would be hidden internal detail that would be currently very difficult or impossible to conduct on a traditional CNC mill then there would definitely be benefits - but certainly the downsides also play a significant part into the equation when you're actually making functional parts. As for the filament, yes I agree that there may be modifiers in random plastics which weren't intended for print extrusion which might mess up the process. But until people start producing it (or we get a machine that can produce the filament - ala pellet drive) then we're really dependent on the sources we can get our hands onto. Personally I'd probably try for the welding rod first because at least it's intended purpose is somewhat closer to what our printers do.

Seems like there has been some success with weed trimmer line and temperatures around 250 degrees C http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,70471 Seems though that there's a variation of Nylons with different extrusion temps though. Also interesting is that Nylon is also hygroscopic and has similar problems as with Polycarbonate with needing the pre-process the filament to get rid of the water before printing.

One thing I think Cura is really missing in its visualisation is the ability to simply rotate an item on the axes for a new print orientation (aside from the Z axis). I would certainly use this function more than the swap axes commands, as I have found that it is often error prone to swap axes to change the printing orientations (due to reversal of the item). For example if I had an 'upside down' STL or just one that I wanted to print the other way up, an asymmetrical model is going to come out incorrectly if you only hit the Z mirror button.

The heated bed I don't think can be an escapable addition to the Ultimaker or any printer which needs to be capable of printing more plastics than currently just PLA. The flexibility it adds to any printing machine is quite substantial. Nylon definitely sounds like an interesting pick, how are you coming about obtaining the feedstock - plastic welding rods?

Side cutters here, pretty much everything you use your knife for except for flattening the blue tape, I use the good old finger for that (though I find for a good stick you need to reseat the tape if it has bubbled). Then for cleaning up the hot end etc. too.

At the moment only wondering and opening the door for discussions about it. I want to eventually print PC for starters because that would really open up opportunities to use printed parts for functional purposes over what the two current common printed plastics.

The materials suggested are examples only If somebody, somewhere is printing something else with the UM I'm all ears. From what I have read it seems the biggest trouble with HDPE was the smell and the very severe shrinkage. Though recently there doesn't seem to have been much talk about HDPE prints, so the information for the most part is all about the early days of DIY printing. I guess it is also a function of how easy it is to get filament for a given material.

Would loose belts cause under-lap on one side of the infill (with the other side overlapped)? I get such an issue every now and again, though I know that my long belt tension is on the low side. The steppers shouldn't be slipping though because the layers are consistent one after the other.

Anybody here using an atypical print material with the UM? Like polycarbonate or HDPE? I'd certainly like to hear your experiences, as well as what sort of modifications you might have needed to do to get to that stage. There seems to have been some polycarbonate attempts with the UM before but it seems it didn't go too far after people started talking about the hot end temperature limits. Would be interesting in the light of the updated hot end design too, though with the new PTFE part should we expect the sudden softening at elevated temps to rear its head at temps above 260?

;TYPE:CUSTOMG1 Z0.000000 F900.000000;End GCodeM104 S0 ;extruder heater offM140 S0 ;heated bed heater off (if you have it)G91 ;relative positioningG1 E-1 F300 ;retract the filament a bit before lifting the nozzle, to release some of the pressureG1 Z+0.5 E-5 X-20 Y-20 F9000 ;move Z up a bit and retract filament even moreG28 X0 Y0 ;move X/Y to min endstops, so the head is out of the wayM84 ;steppers offG90 ;absolute positioning Mine reads this at the end. I believe the G1 Z0 etc. is the line that causes the issue here? If I take the generated STL and slice it in the normal window instead it has this: ;TYPE:CUSTOM;End GCodeM104 S0 ;extruder heater offM140 S0 ;heated bed heater off (if you have it)G91 ;relative positioningG1 F300 E-1G1 X-20.0 Y-20.0 Z0.5 F9000 E-5G28 X0 Y0 ;move X/Y to min endstops, so the head is out of the wayM84 ;steppers offG90 ;absolute positioning Which I believe is normal.

I was using project planner in 12.08, I am printing two objects at the same time next to each other. It seems that there is an issue and it's putting a zero height move command at the end of the print, which therefore tries to (or also successfully) pushes the print into the hot end and crushes my print. I've check the G-code and found the offending line of code, it's not in the usual end section, which appears to be normal. The offending section appears to be generated by the project planner. Anyway, I've resorted to just commenting out the offending line of code, but obviously it shouldn't be doing this and should be checked out before it destroys anybody else's prints.

I personally think that the upkeep and depreciation is a non-negligible part of the overall cost of printing.

It's more along the lines of putting a complicated patch on a simple issue. You will also have to consider that surface homogenity also plays a role in the tracking speed of the optical mouse's sensor, so in all you really haven't gained as much reliability as you might have imagined.

Too late! I didn't remove any material to enlarge it though, just used the shank of a much smaller screwdriver and did some rudimentary burnishing to enlarge it to roughly 3.1mm

I personally didn't have an issue with any of the T-slots and what not, but what I did have a similar issue with the little bearing retaining things on the frame. They have that little tab that doesn't quite let them fall straight off the panels, and yeah they can do that to the caps if you don't remove them carefully.

But there is substantially less force on the bowden section that forms the seal now in terms of the extension and retraction, it is all taken up by the PEEK/Brass part, owens clamp and the tie rods on the head. I would be more concerned about the difficult of inserting the filaments as well as whether the filament will buckle at that point because the tubes aren't really well supported anymore.

Yes, I have tested it more with a filament that had a slightly larger head and I detected that it was more like 5mm where there's a contraction near the hot end. I forcibly made the contracted end larger at the tip, seems that the tube was probably not supplied faulty and it might be something to do with heat softening the tube and pressure crushing it.

Hmm, ok I think I will do that. I also checked it with the shank of a 3mm drill bit (can reasonably reliably measure this to be 3.01mm as it's solid) and it's definitely an interference fit that is going on here.

That's what I'm doing currently, but on windows there's a way to tell it not to go into standby automatically (so for example this might be useful so that after an print completes you computer could go into standby by itself). But I don't know if the facility is available through the python API as such.

I just noticed today after failing a print that Cura does not inhibit standby. The print failed because it went on standby and the heated head blobbed a whole part of my print. It seemed to have disconnected without being resumable as well. It would obviously be really convenient if it inhibited standby when the print was going, and that is my request. tell me if I missed a checkbox for it... wouldn't be the first time :lol:

Today I disassembled my hot end on suspicion of plugging. It wasn't completely blocked (plug would melt when heated) but the print extrusion performance was lowered which made me suspicious. Long story short, I also had the opportunity to measure that end of the bowden. I found that it is pretty close on the mark on 3mm, not quite 3.1mm without some pressure on the calipers and definitely nowhere near 3.2mm. I'm wondering whether the bowden has shrunk or something else gone awry? I'm printing owen's bowden clamp now, so I know that the diameter has definitely not been reduced due to any clamping as such because it has never been clamped. Well aside from that white collar thing. I have always felt that borderline 3mm+ filament segments would get pretty tight towards the hot end side of the bowden, but I always chalked this down to the fact that there's more filament in the bowden and further down the bend when the filament reached that position. Is this actually normal? I always thought that the '3mm' filament must have been 2.89 nominal (as the included roll I was delivered was such) but now that I've been able to try out more filaments from different suppliers I'm having my suspicions that this is not the case (and I have read since that the ID is meant to be 3.175mm nominal or 1/8ths of an inch). It's probably like the last 8cm of my bowden that seems to be tighter - the rest of it is ok.

Looking at it I would guess that it is likely the sort of hose you would find on a lawn mower or around cool areas - some sort of PVC hose. The black stuff you're talking about is probably a synthetic rubber hose, depending on the reinforcement may be used for the injector rails where there is more heat and pressure.

I would be led to believe that the resiliert coupling is synonymous with the Z-axis coupler. It seems that somebody misspelled resilient (although it's not actually a resilient coupler either unless you like really stiff ones ). The set screws are probably the ones that go into the couplers and pulleys to lock them. The drive nut is a bronze leadscrew nut (to go with the leadscrew used obviously), I'm not sure if you can get them with the flats machined in them, but I have seen round and square ones that you can buy. The turndown on the leadscrew also won't come on any stock part, you'll probably have to get that done or use another driving method.

I only did some very quick and dirty math on it but I am guessing the bigger factor is the effect of heat transfer between the heater and the filament. Theoretically you'd be able to get 0.2 grams a second of ABS out of the extruder by imparting 50W of heat to it constantly, which is like 140mm/s of 3mm filament at a guess. ED-that sounds wrong actually... I worked from 20m of filament on a 750g roll.

That's interesting and certainly doesn't match my observations with heating up PLA printed parts. I had a circular part which was about 45.5mm initially, which I then had push-fit to another solid (metallic) part - later I decided I wanted to take it off so heated the solid up to about 50-60 degrees (keeping in tune with the PLA gets soft at 60 degree thing) which ended up shrinking the part down to about 44.2mm. I guess it might be that on a 3mm section it's not an observable difference on the very-nears.