blecheimer

For testing surface quality and small layers I made this compressor wheel: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:53455 I scale it down to 50% then the print is fast but challenging. click for larger image I am quite satisfied with this print quality though there is always room for improvement. The layer height in the picture is 0.05mm, pla-diameter and steps-per-e are standard. And I am using two fans, which helps a lot. Maybe you try my gcode and test it for yourself. With cura you can use the gcode to see my print profile. comp_wheel.gcode If I reduce the layer height to 0.02mm I have to reduce the extrusion, too. Otherwise the print quality is getting worse. But I do ask myself, Is a layer height lower than 0.1mm really necessary or even usefull? Most of the time I am using 0.15mm layers and this is totally OK for me.

I have PLA from at least five different suppliers. When I want to print some fast prototypes or just functional parts, I use some cheap white and black PLA. But when I need quality and some fancy colors I always rely on the PLA from faberdashery. It is not cheap, but very, very good. And I can get it by meter - I do not need to buy a whole spool. For me that is a big plus.

I have not put the two fan ducts on thingiverse as they only work for the old V1 hot end. They will not fit the V2 version that most ultimakers are using (I guess). If there are still some V1 users out there, I an happy to share the two fan ducts. And yes, a recalibration of the e-steps is a good idea, though I am quite happy with the results of my ultimaker at the moment.

I have an Ultimaker with extruder upgrade, the old V1 hot end and self-made double-cooling. For slicing I use Cura, PLA is from Faberdashery. And this is how the Ultimaker Robot looks like on my machine: click for a larger image As you can see, I am still having some minor issues with overhangs. The slicing profile is a slightly tweaked standard Cura High Quality setting: Ultimaker Robot GCode

Deshalb mache ich zwei Lagen Klebeband auf mein Bett. Eine Lage mit dem blauen 3M Klebeband und darauf dann die eigentliche Lage für den Druck. Dadurch kann ich recht einfach den Druck zur Not mit samt dem Klebeband entfernen ohne Rückstände auf dem Bet zu haben.

Ich mache es so: In Cura einfach auf "Print" klicken, nach dem Verbinden begint die Heizphase. Wenn dir die Zeit nicht reicht, kannst du den Druck immer noch abbrechen. Mit dem Ulticontroller ist es natürlich einfacher. Da gibt es eine Menüoption zum Aufheizen.

The new upgraded extruder drive is great. Maybe the biggest improvement of my Ultimaker. Unfortunately I had some problems with the extruder in the last days. The extruder was eating up my filament because the delrin ring deformed and was blocking the extruder. BTW: Using a soft material like delrin to add pressure to the filament is not a really good idea. The solution was to replace the delrin ring with a metal ring that would not deform. A perfect match to the exisiting 3x8x4 ball bearing is another ball bearing (8x14x4 - around 1€): The new BB is visible in the lower section of the picture. Just throw the ugly delrin ring away and slide the new BB over the old BB. You can clearly see the wear on the delrin ring. I am quite opimistic that this will not happen with the new ball bearing.

I have the same issue with their brass/gold PLA, that was delivered with my Ultimaker in August 2012. Totally un-useable. Since then I try to avoid using Ultimaker PLA. Better safe than sorry.

Mir gefällt das weisse und schwarze Filament von http://www.2printbeta.de/ . Lässt sich gut bei 195°C drucken, gleichmäßgier Durchmesser. Nehme ich immer, wenn es schnell gehen soll und für alle Testdrucke. Das Filament von Ultimaker ist leider in der Qualität stark schwankend. Ich habe gelbes, das ist super. Dann war noch eine Rolle bronze Filament dabei, die ist die totale Gurke - schwankender Durchmesser von 2.5 bis 3.3mm. Mein Lieblingsfilament kommt aus England von http://www.faberdashery.co.uk/ . Kostet etwas mehr, ist aber einsame Spitze. Tolle Farben, gleichmäßige Dicke, niedrige Temperatur. Damit habe ich immer ein Top-Ergebnis. PS: Filament immer trocken lagern, denn es zieht Wasser an. Am besten in luftdichter Folie zusammen mit Silikat oder Reis. "Feuchtes" Filament versaut einem den Druck.

Maybe I don't understand the issue, but when I turn the big wheel by hand, my filament is pushed through the hot end.

OK, tried it - but same result. There is sill the slicing error starting at layer 341.

Thanks for the info, I will give it a try.

I wanted to print the polygon mask from Thingiverse ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:33505 ) and sliced it with Cura 12.11. For large objects I normaly use 0.24 layer height, 0.8 wall thickness, 15% infill. You can find my profile here. At the begining everything looked fine: This is layer 334. You can see two walls (= 0.8mm) and the infill. But then just a few layers later... ... at layer 341 there is only one wall (= 0.4mm). This continued for another 100 layers and pretty much screwed up my print. Has anybody an idea what happend during slicing? Why did cura change to 0.4mm wall thickness? :?:

Get the rainbow pack, you won't regret it! It is really high quality filament.

Innovation upgrade: Cura 10.08 Win/Mac support ... 10.08? Did I miss something? What happend to 12.10?

MIt deinem Problem kann ich dir nicht helfen, da ich Netfabb nicht benutze (nur Cura) und ich die Software evtl. als Fehlerquelle vermute. Aber - ein Raft braucht man beim Einsatz von PLA nicht. Direkt weglassen und stattdessen ein Skirt verwenden. D.h. der Drucker "umrandet" als ersten den Bereich, auf dem er drucken wird. Das hilft beim Druckstart und zeigt, ob das Bett den richtigen Abstand zur heissen Düse hat. Wenn nicht, reicht ein Griff an die Z-Spindel zur Justage. Punkt 1: Vollkommen korrekt! Punkt 2: Auch richtig. Punkt 3: Komplett streichen und durch Punkt 2 ersetzen. Skinforge ist kein Verfahren, sondern ein Slicer, wie Cura, RepG oder Netfabb (bitte korrgiert mich, falls ich da was falsches sage). Ob es ein "bestes Programm" gibt, weiss ich nicht. Ich komme mit Cura sehr gut zurecht, weil es mich schnell und einfach zu sehr guten Ergebnissen bringt. Punkt 4: Der Ultimaker benötigt eine Firmware. Es gibt meines Wissens drei Stück: 5D, Sprinter und Marlin. Marlin ist die Firmware der Wahl. Muss man IMHO haben. Über die anderen braucht man sich eigentlich keine Gedanken mehr zu machen. Punkt 5: Der Controller arbeitet mit der Firmware des Ultimaker. Ultimaker und Ulticontroller sind quasi eine Einheit. Ich würde aber meine ersten Schritte ohne den Ulticontroller machen. Vergiss einfach die ersten Wochen lang, dass es ihn gibt. Benutze die USB-Verbindung und lerne die Basics kennen. Wenn das sitzt und der Ultimaker mechanisch korrekt kalibriert ist (Stichwort Riemenspannung), dann stöpsel den Ulticontroller ein und setze dich damit auseinander. Ich habe meinen Ulticontroller erst nach vier Wochen das erste mal angeschlossen.

OK, there is new spam everywhere. Dear admin, is it really that difficult to shut down the automatic user registration and to switch to "validation by email"? I am running a not-so-small PHPBB as well and from my experience I can tell you that changing the registration is verrry easy and for the moment highly effective. This will give you time to secure your PHPBB and clean-up your user-list. BTW: You cannot keep spamers outside with Captcha, because some of these spamers are real persons, not bots. I guess they are paid to spam.

Alternativly you can look for a DIN913 M4 grub screw, 4mm long on ebay.

That's interesting - can you take a picture of the ultimaker that was use to make this object? I am especially interested to see the hot end.

I wanted to see, if my Ultimaker is able to print really small parts. So I designed a micro dumper. It is 25 x 20 x 17 mm small and fully operational. You can find the STL-Files here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32773

This is my very first experiment with 3D scanning and printing. I have to work on the details as the scan is quite rough. My glasses are not scanned but design in CAD. I used a Kinect sensor + ReconstructMe to scan myself. For cutting and cleaning the mesh I tried Neftfabb Studio Basic. The 3D print has 0.8mm walls, 5% infill, 0.1mm layer hight and took about 3 hours. I scaled myself down to 15% (...writing that feels scary...).

I guess it is the shrinkage of the PLA when cooling down. The sides of my cube are 19.7mm.

I have not tested this, but according to my measurements it is a quite normal DIN913 M4 grub screw, 4mm long (5mm should be ok as well). I would try something like this: http://www.ebay.de/itm/280974496805 http://www.ebay.de/itm/140762775530 http://www.ebay.de/itm/230740205460

Normaly my most usefull tools are a sharp knife and my tweezers. But then I made these two tools to remove my things and the skirts from the bed. Those two are quite simple but they are doing the job really well. If anybody wants to try them, the STL-file can be found here.

The testprint with 0.4mm walls and 0.35mm nozzle size looks ok. On a closer look I still have some slight holes in the walls.