snowygrouch
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Posts posted by snowygrouch
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To achieve what ?
(I also call the "BS" card on that video....)
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Good question !
No I have not tried will all the belts off...its such a pain to take apart to that leve I dont know if I can face testing your idea ! :lol:
I suppose I should test that before I spend out on new parts though.
I did spend a while to align the XY rods because certainly if there is any misalignment the linear ball bearings
in the printhead they sound like very unhappy fellows. But that was more a constant grumbling sound than a varying one.
C.
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Hi,
I have used it almost every working day for about 5 years.
I also love and hate it in fairly equal measure, but its ability to do basically ANYTHING, as well as cope
with massive assemblies really sets it apart from anything else. Although you will find hundreds who
will say the same about Pro/E and NX....
So I can probably answer most questions about using CATIA V5.
Regards
C.
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Hi,
Interesting to hear, I might load up Netfabb again. I have been using Kisslicer.
When I moved from Cura to Kisslicer the retration appeared also very violent in comparison. But
it worked really well !
C.
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Ok thanks Daid, I will pass that on to my friend in the UK.
C.
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Hi,
I only just emailed them to ask for a quote !
Will post prices as soon as I get a response. Its in the USA unfortunately, but I cannot believe
that a similar product is not available in the European union...somewhere.
C.
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Im going to buy some new belts and pulleys, although my print quaility is now much improved generally
its still not as good as it could be.
When I move the printhead around by hand, it makes a sounds like "vvvvvvVVVVVvvvvvvvVVVVVvvvvvVVVV"
Its movement is not even across the bed XY area. This can be traced to the pulleys being eccentric, which is
parcially because they are cheap in general but mostly because of the grub screw attachemnt method. Which is unreliable, damages the shafts and causes the pulley to rotated off centre (see attached image).
Anyway, im going to buy some of these pulleys, which look much more sensibly designed to attach concentrically to a shaft. Of course they will cost way more than the standard ones...but Im happy to pay.
http://www.cmtco.com/pdf/cmt_primer.pdf
Anyway, I will get back with some results in a while, but in the mean-time perhaps someone has had similar ideas or tried something like this and can share the results ?
C.
EDIT, I tried to align the pulleys so that they are all eccentric at the same angle together..which did help a little bit. But clearly its also the tolerances of the pulleys as well as the grub screw cause thats the issue.
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Can you give any pointers about where to look on the main Ultimaker PCB ?
Not all of us are electronics guys...
C.
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I agree with alot of what you say Daid, however I would add the following points:
1) If it IS only 3 people, the it doesnt really cost Ultimaker anything to replace does it ?
2) Generally if there is a problem only a very small number of people will actually go onto a forum
and publicly complain. I dont know what the ratio is, but if there are 3 complaints you can bet there
are ALOT more people with faulty parts who are just in the background.
C.
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Hmmm well that sucks....
It might well be that from the legal sense they do not HAVE to provide a warranty for this...BUT
I would have thought that they would do so for the following 3 reasons.
1) Evidently due to the number of people having this problem its clearly a problem with bad manufacture, such
that the products are being DELIVERED in sub-standard condition.
2) This part is an UPGRADE, no part of the normal kit. Its asking ALOT to make people pay for an
uprgade that is being provided with sub-standard level of manufacture. Which is not fit for purpose.
3) Pissing of your customers in a market as saturated as the budget 3D printer market is basically
just about the stupidest thing possible and will hurt the company by orders of mangnitude more than it
would to simply replace the broken units without complaint.
:!: Sort out your act Ultimaker !!!! :!:
If my Ulticontroller breaks, I will arrive at your doorstep and refuse to leave until I have been given another
one...FREE.
C.
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A friend in the UK who bought an Ultimaker at the same time as me, has just called me up
saying the display on his machine is going wrong. Exactly the same symptoms.
So it does look more like there is possibly some problem here with the production of these parts.
C.
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Hi Bill,
Helical gears can avoid backlash when ground in steel. Modern gear grinders can grind gears to within
7 decimal places in metric units. Talking fractions of microns....
I dont think that 3D printed gears of any shape will reduce backlash, because the mnaufacturing tolerances are
so colosally above the theoretical shape of the meshing gear pair.
If you want to reduce the backlash, you can do so perfectly adequately with the standard unit by
adjusting the centre distances of the shafts. When you see Kisslicer do a retract motion, it will often
do something like a 1/4 of a full turn of the big gear to do so (90 degrees)
If you were to replace the gears with ground hardened steel helical gears, in a special steel housing, you would
probably eliminate about 1 degree of backlash. So the backlash you have once the extruder is optimally assembled
will equal about one hundredth of the rotation used by a typical retract motion. In other words, by all means do it but I promise it will make absolutely no difference whatsoever to the print performance. Once you consider that the printed gear will be to a lower tolerance than the gears you have now...you will be going backwards.
If there is alot of backlash, just loosten the stepper motor screws in the extruder assembly, and slide it towards the big gear until rotation gives noticable friction. The backlash will then be neglidgable.
Unfortunately, 3D printed gears are about the last thing that will ever be removed from coventional manufacturing in the additive manufacturing revolution.
There are no appreciable side loads on your gears, and so once your black clip is adjusted properly there will be no gain in print performance or reliability by printing your own gears. In fact I almost guarantee the backlash will go UP because the manufacturing tolerances are far worse than the laser cut items you have (even if they are just spur gears).
Sorry I suppose thats not really very useful when you just want a link to a file download. Other than searching
thingiverse I cannot suggest anything - if you really must have them you will probably need to design them
yourself if there is nothing on thingiverse
C.
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Personally what I did when I built the machine was to file off about 1/4 of the thickness of the
black clip where it goes over the shaft to lock it in place.
This was because, when I aligned the knurling where I wanted it, the black plastic clip didnt QUITE
actually snap properly into the groove. Thus meaning that with a tiny amount of force it would easily
ping off.
If the black clip is properly in place there is absolutely NO way that the machine can generate enough shaft
side load to ping it off.
So have a look, because my guess is 90% that your clip is not able to fully seat into the groove in the steel shaft.
Fix that and it will never come off. Modify black clip as shown below if you think this is your problem.
C.
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Hi,
If the controller is broken, I would think that this is clearly a warranty issue and you would be given a
new unit free of charge.
Secondly, if there is a bad connection on the board somewhere, its possible it can be seen if you
just take the case off the controller.
Also its very possible to fix slightly poor surface mount solder joints cowboy style with a hair-dryer. I can personally vouch that this does actually work (on XBOX consoles...)
Just be careful not to fry anything sensitive. But if its broken give it a shot !
C.
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I dont know what slicer you are using, so cannot comment on that side of things.
But I do know that 205 degrees is quite low for trying to print fast. The problem tends to be that
is doesnt matter what the extruder wheel does, if the hotend is too cold you cannot melt enough plastic
in time because the mass flow rate is faster. The hotend takes a while to heat up, and has only quite low
thermal mass (the metal bits are quite small) so you can only store so much heat energy there. When you try to pass plastic through, you remove heat energy from the hotend. If this gets fast enough, you can remove the heat faster than you can put it back. This means the plastic will not get fluid enough to squeeze through the tip quickly.
I suggest you increase your print temp at high speeds and try again.
C.
EDIT: Whoops looks like Joergen already pretty much answerd that in your other post. Nevermind.
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What I did, is to slice an STL model, in two different slicers - and then post the times that it took. Then I posted this data in a thread created by someone who is writing their own slicer and was looking for recommendations.
Thats IT, thats ALL that happened.
However I am not a moron, and so of course that is why this information was posted NOT in the CURA section of the forum (where it would obviously be just inflammatory, and not of use), but in the "other" section of the forum where someone was asking for recommendations about what can be improved about current slicer software, AND where a discussion was already underway about slicing times.
If anyone wants a show of how popular CURA is, they only need to look at the forum posts - which show it has well over twice as much discussion as the nearest other slicer (which costs 150 Euros).
C.
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1) Quality
2) Speed
3) Stability with large STL file sizes
4) Support material configurations
5) Infill material configurations
6) Ease of configuration
I would add that no amount of quality will outweigh speed if its really really slow.
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Hi Daid,
I would be careful about saying that people are quite accepting of Skinforge in CURA. Im not !
This is (for me) a small file:
CURA = 10 minuites
KISSLICER = 40 seconds
Thats 15x faster !
If I spend 2 hours a day waiting for the slicer, if I switch to KISSLICER I can get all my work done in 8 minuites.
Scale that over a couple of weeks and I have saved a huge amount of money.
I simply cannot possibly find hours and hours to waste waiting for the slicer.
So as long as KISSCLICER is 15x faster than CURA, I cannot consider using CURA.
C.
(Also now I look at the images, I had CURA with 0.2mm layer height. And KS has 0.16mm, so KS has computed 20% more layers)
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Hi,
CanFire, all those issues are fixable by editing the prefix code in the Kisslicer menu. You can easily
make it heat up and start where ever you like in XYZ space.
I found KISSLICER to be really a pain to set up for the ultimaker when I was used to CURA, but I found
on the google Ultimaker group that at least two people have posted their 3 config files for Kisslicer. All
you need to do is to paste these 3 files into the home directory of Kisslicer and it will use those settings.
There are three reasons I like KISSLICER, first is that for the typical CAD models I use most other slicers
take up to 1 hour to even slice them. KISSCLICER can do the same file in under 5minuites.
Secondly the retraction results are far superior to those obtainable from anything else, although I have not tried
the very latest NETFABB and CURA versions.
Thirdly KISSLICER can handle really big STL files without falling over. Which is not something that can be said for CURA unfortunatley.
On the flipside, the STL file position and rotation manipulation is much better in CURA, as are the variety of settings for infill and support. CURA was also alot easier to get working well quickly from a standing start.
I would say if you are usually working with small files without much need for retraction, CURA is very nice. But with tricky geometries and large STL files KISSCLICER is literally on a different level.
You can download my KISSLICER config files from my website if you want them.You might have to tweak the steps per e.
C.
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Daid is probably right about the controller, so all I can suggest is the good "old faithful" of pull all the ribbon connectors out and re-insert a couple of times (with the machine off obviously).
C.
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I cannot assist with the corrupted character display, but firstly why are you printing from USB at all ?
Thats basically almost the most useful part of the ulticontroller is to print from SD card...
The SD card is far easier, far cheaper (no electricity running a PC overnight and so on) and far more reliable.
Secondly, you can adjust the speed all you want from the Ulticontroller without the USB connected.
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Thats a pretty exhaustive list of things changed !
I would recommend that you do this:
1) Heat up the hotend to whatever temp you normally print at
2) Unclip the rear of the extruder so the wheel isnt clamping the filament
3) Push the filament through the bowden and hotend by hand, this should be no trouble at 220 or 230. Get
a feel for how much force is needed to do that.
4) Now print as normal until you get the griding.
5) quickly repeat step 2 and 3. Notice if the filament is possible to push through by hand. If its much much harder
to push though, or even impossible you know you have a plugging problem. If its just as easy as before, then you know
you have an extruder problem.
This will at least show you which end of the machine to investigate.
If its the hotend, it means you have an assembly problem, probably the position of the bowden or the end not
being cut square. Also I personally have a fetish for active cooling on the hotend, and maintain its the only
way to print 100% reliably all day long. However...most people seem to find the V2 hotend to be "ok", so you should be
able to make it work.
If its the extruder, you need to sort out your spring force, get a better knurled bolt, or check the position
of the knurling. The UMaker one is really badly made and the knurling is tapered in depth, so along the width
of the knurling only the last 3mm is actually nice and sharp. The rest is just blunt. If the bolt is shuffled
too far one way, you might be running the filament against the blut area of the knurnling. Have a look at that.
Of course its possible its BOTH ! But I think by doing the above test you will see where the real issue is.
(shameless corporate angling follows)
If its plugging you are suffering from I would recommend downloading the STL from my website and putting a fan to cool the hotend. It costs almost nothing to do, and you will never have a plug again.
Regards
C.
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The problem here is not "accuracy", which is at any rate fixed by the machine because of the belts
and pulleys. Only fiddling with the tension can optimise that.
What you are mostly dealing with is shrinkage. The plastic is going from 220 Deg C to 20 Deg C, although
PLA has a fairly low coefficient of thermal expansion its still going to shrink as it cools.
So all you can do is to measure what shrinkage you get by printing a very long test piece then scale
UP your STL files by whatever the shrinkage is. I think for me about +0.5% worked well.
Unfortunatley its very much like metal casting, the shrinkage also depends on the shape of the parts
and how they are constrained. Large solid areas will shrink alot, open areas which are mostly infill will not
shrink very much, also varies by the infill density and so on.
The very best you can do (realistically), is to work out your scaling factor and work to that. The shrinkage is what you get from cooling plastic and has nothing whatsoever to do with the mechanics of the printer or the software.
C.
Amazing speed of TinyG Ultimaker!
in Third party products & modifications
Posted
Hmm well the video says accel increased to value of 50,000mm/min sq.
Which is actually more or less identical to standard accel of around 900mm/sec sq, just multipled by
60 to make into minuites for some reason....
Dont know what the standard "jerk" is set to....
(Apologies for 1st post, I violated the golden rule of internet forums "never post messages after drinking")