calinb

The photo sequence is: 1. 24% (single layer) 2. 25% (single layer) 3. 25% (two layers) Note that Cura prints a full hatch pattern per layer at 24% but only "half" a hatch pattern per layer at 25%. More significantly, the overall hatch density increases disproportionately at 25%, compared to the 24% fill setting. I'm trying to obtain a hatch density somewhere between 24% and 25%. Is there a way to do it? I printed it both ways and the Rep-Host depiction is correct and accurate. For reference, the grid is the standard Rep-Host grid (10 mm). Thanks!

The most force you can apply to the filament is by combining the force of the feeder with manual assist (using pliers, if desired, but I usually just wear a nitrile glove to increase my grip on the filament). You can use the feeder motor to push the filament, but I just use one hand to turn the big gear while pushing down with my wrist on the UM chassis, and my other hand to push upward on the filament--always gripping the filament very close to the entrance to the feeder while keeping the filament direction square to the feeder. I installed one of these add-ons to keep the feeder in place: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:25436 I have often cleared partial and complete jams this way but, more importantly, I "prime" the hot end fully using this technique before every print to make sure the hot end is free-flowing plastic through the nozzle. I've found that partial jams are common when starting a new print (perhaps due to the state of the once molten and partially molten plastic inside the head) and this precaution will nearly always get the print off to a good start much better than any "priming" performed in the gcode.

Next time you take the hot end apart, take a close look at the V2 Teflon tube (between the Bowden tube and the brass tube). My Teflon tube developed a small chip right next to the brass tube on the inside wall. This was causing jams. I removed the Teflon tube entirely. Also, the Teflon tube ID is supposed to be slightly smaller than the ID of the brass tube, so any melted or soft plastic that re-hardens in the Teflon tube is more likely to be able to pass into the brass tube. With my V2 brass tube and Teflon tube, this is not the case! The Teflon tube ID is larger than the brass tube. In fact, my Bowden tube ID is smaller than the Teflon tube ID and my hotend is running fine without the Teflon tube, but then again, the V1 never had a Teflon tube either. I also mostly print ABS and nylon (618 and 3ntr PA-6) and haven't run much PLA since removing the Teflon tube.

Hmm...I've done some testing of a hot end that has only a sightly more powerful heater (lower resistance) than the UM cartridge heater and my power supply/drivers could not power it reliably. (I had to reduce PID_MAX in Configuration.h to use the hot end.) Here's the line: #define PID_MAX 256 // limits current to nozzle while PID is active (see PID_FUNCTIONAL_RANGE below); 256=full current Can you confirm that, in running each heater singly and alone (as in single extrusion mode), one of the heaters behaved faultily?

This approach has its upsides and downsides. While it enables you to detect some problems, it does not adequately predict most problems associated with plastic shrinkage, including bed adhesion, and even bridging problems sometimes. I no longer bother to print under-size test prints, because they too often turn out to be a waste of plastic and printer time after the full-size version still develops problems, despite a successful under-size test print. Under-size test prints are great for learning the art and wizardry of 3D printing, however, and I also recommend that you use them while climbing your learning curve. I usually find it best to keep an eye on my first full size print to watch for developing problems. Usually I can abort the print, if I see an unacceptable problem developing.

>So, guide me! How would one tackle something like this? I have much experience printing prototypes of training guns used by my company's customers (large police departments in the U.S.). The orientation you selected in Cura is probably the best choice, given no modifications to the model. However, I would split the model horizontally (near the height of the muzzle) such that I could print it in two pieces with no level overhangs and full footprints on the bed to obtain the best possible bed adhesion and retention. Then I would mix up my own ABS cement by dissolving ABS in MEK (just like what's available in the plumbing section of home improvement and hardware stores in black only) and bond and clamp the two parts together. If you are using PLA, there are several threads here and on the reprap forum, as I recall, suggesting methods for bonding this more difficult to join material. I would post photos of my company's printed prototypes and also injection molded products, but they look too much like real guns (scary!) and would likely be deemed non-PC by many members of the "maker community!" :( -Cal Update: Just to be clear--my suggestion is to bisect the muzzle and print the top piece right side-up and the bottom piece upside-down (orientations are from the shooters perspective when presenting the gun, which is standard in the firearms industry when referring to directions like up/down and right/left, BTW). It should not require any support using this method but the two pieces will need to be joined. If you have an aversion to bonding the pieces together, you could use hardware (drill for screws, tap threads, use nuts, etc.).

If you're in the US, the machines from www.littlemachineshop.com have some nice upgrades from the typical Sieg- manufactured (Chinese) products, which are also offered by nearly all the hobby tool vendors other than Sherline and Taig (Enco, Harbor Freight, Grizzly, Micro-Mark, Homier, Cummins, and more). As long as you're willing to learn about the tool limitations, make appropriate adjustments often, and upgrade the machine's deficiencies in various details (kind of like a hobby 3D printer), there is no reason you can't hold 0.001" tolerances for most projects. You have to go slow, not try to machine something unreasonably large, and pick the right tool bits. High quality high speed steel bits are usually the best choice and carbide is usually NOT the best choice for these small machines. These cutting tools are very nice for small hobby machines: http://www.arwarnerco.com/

Haha, but yikes--plenty of scary reminders of statism and nationalism in that lesson , but then, one of my favorite movies is Jean Renoir's 1937 film, "The Grand Illusion." By the way, the "empty" U.S. Dakota states are full of freedom and liberty (at least as much as our masters and rulers empowered by fed.gov permit them to enjoy, which isn't much these days). The Dakotas offer the most fiscal sustainability of the entire 50 and are now ranked #1 and #2 in Mercatus Center's "Freedom in the Fifty States" rankings! http://freedominthe50states.org/ As you can see, even if you've visited New York City (or San Francisco), don't judge the entire U.S. from that experience!

Yup! <sigh> These old crap aps (single threaded) would probably run faster on my 3.8 GHz P4! Even then, the doubled portions of the older and very long pipelined Willamette architecture ("Hyperthreading") would still not be used.

Right--my point was the original offers "bleeding edge" features that are not yet available in the UM2. So the original is still the "latest and greatest!"

Thanks, Joergen. I might demo DesignSpark a bit more and ask Spaceclaim for a new quote. I'd give up my preferred history-based CAD style for something that's fast and reliable anyway. I'm on Geomagic Design 2014. They've fixed a few bugs and introduced others. It's still pretty buggy and often recalcitrant when doing tough stuff like boolean ops and merging the geometry of complex stuctures during extrusions, but the frames for our products ARE as complex as the demos and I created them with Alibre/Geomagic. Often a small change will get something working, or doing things in a slightly different order or manner. Certainly the program tests my patience--much like the buggy netfabb Engine does too! Oh--I always keep a recent Geomagic .AD_PRT backup file that I don't use for editing. File corruption can happen. Sometimes closing the entire program (including the menu GUI) and restarting it can unblock a buggy impasse too. Strange! After noticing that most of these CAD program still don't thread worth a damn, I put together a real "space heater" of a workstation for cheap using surplus Dell parts. It has a 3.8 GHz P4 (the highest core clock Intel has ever shipped) and a true 4GB of memory (none wasted to memory mapped I/O). Under XP-64, Geomagic runs pretty well on it. It would take a fairly expensive new multi-core CPU to make up for the raw clocking horsepower of the old Willamette core, given that no threading is involved.

If "latest and greatest version is defined as a model with dual extruders" then, yes, the Ultimaker is still the latest and greatest version. You can buy the optional dual extrusion kit for it. I don't think you'll see dual extrusion on the Ultimaker 2 for a while. (I'm sure UM, Ltd. isn't saying how long.).

If you would rather have a UM2 than the original UM, I recommend building the UM you have and getting it up and running. You'll learn much that is applicable to the UM2 by building the original kit and you'll be far ahead of most UM2 newbies! Then sell the completed and tested UM (if you still wish to part with it). You'll probably be able to sell it for little or no loss in cash. Then buy the UM2. I've only studied the videos and photos of the UM2 but I agree that it is not necessarily a "better" printer than the UM. Personally, I don't think there will ever be a "turn-key" FDM/FFF 3D printer sold. 3D printing isn't like printing your vacation photos on your disposable inkject printer! However, there is certainly room for improvement, industry-wide, in the ease of use department. I've even speculated that Apple must have considered getting into the FFF printer market, but decided against it, because Apple found the technology to be unsuitable for their market and usability goals. When I was a server signal integrity engineer with Intel, Apple was one of my customers, but that was servers and my notion about the prospects of an Apple 3D printer is just pure speculation on my part, If a turn-key "think different" imbodiment of a FFF printer could be realized, I think it would fit into Apple's product line quite well, however.

Sweet! And thanks. I've not had time to look there for awhile.

It may be beautiful but I print more than garden gnomes using a variety of plastics for industrial and manufacturing purposes. I'm currently designing and printing nylon solvent-resistant dies that must handle up to 400 psi in a press. On the occasion that I attempt to clear a jam or a chunk of garbage from the hot end or nozzle, it is far easier to manipulate the filament feeder with both hands (one hand pushing hard up on the filament and the other hand rotating the drive mechanism while opposing the 40 or 50 lbs of upwards pressure I can generate with my filament hand (sometimes getting even more pressure with vice grips on the filament). I can use my Ulticontroller to advance the filament (updated my Marlin FW) as with the UM2, but clearing a hot end with the controller is not as effective as the brute force manual approach. One can also manually reverse the filament direction far faster than can be done with a controller. Rapidly "pumping" the filament back and forth (like clearing a toilet with a plunger) can often loosen and clear crud from a hotend. It is very apparent how well the toilet plungering technique works when going from a cruded-up dark material to a lighter one. While the extruded thread might appear clear while extruding normally, some rapid plungering often produces a stream of dark chunks from a fouled hot end! It's best to alternate regular extrusion with plungering until the extrusion runs clear. I believe that many exasperated user complaints of jams, which I often read about in 3D printer forums (UM forum included), could be solved with my last-ditch, brute force techniques. I will never sacrifice function for beauty in my machines and I will never have an FFF machine without a means to aggressively manually advance and retract the filament.

IMO, if you are printing PLA and the "Ultra" and "High" quality Buildstyles and Materials presets are not working for you, new settings will probably not help you. There is probably something else going on. Even for ABS, only the support settings need to change (a difficult and iterative challenge). If you can tell me specifically what is wrong with your results (more information than just "not good"), we might be able to help you, but I have no profiles to offer you that are any better than the defaults for printing PLA. I find the "Ultra" settings to be the most impressive and notable, but bed leveling is obviously more critical than it is for "High" or "Standard" settings. BTW, the "Low" quality profile is not useful. It's my understanding that it was contributed to netfabb by someone other than the lead developer on the project. I recommend that you don't use it. Oh--I almost forgot. Post photos and we can be of greater assistance to you.

Yup--and this is precisely why I'll probably stick with history-based solid model CAD tools (mostly sketch-oriented but basic "direct" editing is nice to have too). Such CAD tools offer control over both the associations between operations and the ordering of the operations themselves. (You can change the order that things get done and which operations affect or do not affect others.) I've demoed most of the other CAD philosophies and I guess I'm just a SolidWorks kinda guy (but too poor for SW so I'll use Geomagic/Alibre Design instead). I don't really need for the CAD program to suggest what it thinks I need to do either. I just need it to do what I WANT it to do!

Yeah--I had the idea to export .skp to Inventor Fusion, where I could convert it to whatever I might need, but the export was so slow, it's unusable on anything more complex than a simple cube.

Yeah--it doesn't make sense. Sort of a used car salesman marketing approach if you ask me! Though etiquette may frown on asking someone what they paid for certain things, In the case of software, I don't mind telling! I think SolidWorks quoted something like $5K, as I recall. There was no way we would spend $7K. We went with Alibre (now Geomagic). It has a few annoying bugs, which consume a user's time and patience, but I like sketch history-based parametric design and I've heard even the gold standard, Solid Works, can be irritating with bugs, at times. Thanks for the tip, illuminarti.

No extra parts are needed to move the X/Y steppers into cool air outside of the box. Simply mount them outside without spacers, reposition the belt pulleys appropriately, and continue to use the short belts. Direct drive is not necessary. If you don't want to rebuild Marlin, just swap the two wire pairs within the white connector shells at the Arduino board to make the motors run the correct direction. I have a 10" x 11" x 5/16" bed made from Mic-6 tooling plate with a 10" x 11" silicone heater (oversize so no cool edges/corners within the build area). Mic-6 is great! It's very, very flat and stable with temperature changes. I wish my entire Z-stage were made of Mic-6. 6mm/1/4" Mic-6 would be wonderful, if you can provide it..

I know that trick, but monitoring the temp closely isn't that convenient either. I prefer to direct my attention to manually priming the nozzle until the head homes..

Same here. No lost prints, because I stop the print immediately when it occurs and I've never seen it begin its stuttering after a print is successfully underway. It's just a nuisance to have to do power-down resets so often and reload all that's required to restart a job, wait for the PID nozzle temp control to stabilize, etc. I'd be more irritated by it if I used the UM to control my heated bed temperature, but I use a bombproof $25 Chinese Ebay PID controller for that. It's far more reliable and more soundly constructed and assembled than any of my electronics supplied by UM, Ltd. and it never gives me a lick of trouble!

It didn't take long to discover the "catch" in the free deal. It doesn't seem to permit the importation of any standard solid model formats. (It imports only .step but read-only, which is nearly worthless.) It also does not permit the export of standard solid models required for, say, injection mold manufacture. Geesh--even the free version of AutoCAD Inventor Fusion supports import and export of standard solid model formats, though the performance of the program leaves much to be desired. DesignSpark seems fine for designing stuff for a personal 3D printer but I guess ya' get what ya' pay-for!

I've mostly played with nozzle size and width settings in Kisslicer and I forgot to mention that I also usually play with the flow to get the finer infill to fill out well and overlap too. Then I use the Inset Surface feature to get the walls back where they need to be.

Wow--you got a bargain, Daid! I think they quoted US$7k per year to me so I didn't even bother with their free trial, but maybe the price was high because I have a small startup business. I don't know what their business was like during its first few years but startups aren't wealthy. In fact, they typically lose money far longer than the investors ever expect! There's no way I'm spending $7k every year on Spaceclaim anytime soon!