tomnagel

Feeder tension should be in the middle position, don't forget to put it back. Maybe you can try another filament as a test, to see whether or not it has anything to do with the PVA. Any kinks/sharp bends in the bowden tube that causes extra friction?

This is clearly not good, this is called grinding. There can be many reasons for grinding. My advice: reverse the screw that you used to tighten the feeder. The indicator on the outside of the feeder should be in the middle. This holds for all UM materials. Then we have to find the cause of grinding. Biggest chance is that your BB nozzle is clogged. Instructions to unclog it can be found here After cleaning the BB core, use the menu to load the PVA. Does it feed through the bowden tube without problems? Does it extrude from the nozzle?

No, it's actually the first 20mm, not the first 20 layers. I'm pretty sure you hear the z-motor do the active leveling thing. You can also test this by turning off Active Leveling (never) AND performing an manual leveling routine. The following print will not have Active Leveling, and the ticking/grinding sound should disappear.

I only use the default settings, I'm not sure what they are. These work really well. What is the pink support material? Is that some form of PVA?

Please note: horizontal expansion is default in the PLA/PVA profiles. The default profiles are really good, I recommend not to experiment with settings before you have seen good results with these. See my pictures here By the way: if you want to get rid of any changes that you have made in the "Custom" tab with all the settings, click the drop down box, and select "discard current changes".

The release notes of 3.5 give the answer to your first point: this is on purpose, to save the user time when the material was successfully deprimed after the most recent print. On your second point: if your build plate is unflat, it matters where the calibration points are. V3.5 uses new measurement positions, and that might be unfavourable for you. Have you tried flipping the glass?

Cura 2.4 (available in Beta) has some new features, making it possible to disable the prime tower in most of the printing profiles (amongst which are the PLA/PVA profiles), while retaining print quality. Saves material and printing time!

You can use a tool in Sketchup for model checking. See https://ultimaker.com/en/community/35941-cura-layers-slices-dont-match-normal-view-mode#reply-168428

My experience is that Sketchup is notoriously bad in delivering good models. Cura is pretty robust, but can/will not fix everything. Maybe the X-ray view helps in finding where the model problems are. And in the past, I have used "Solid Inspector2" plugin in Sketchup to fix errors in my models. That worked pretty well.

PVA should stick to the buildplate just fine. Really. With the default profiles. I advise against playing with the settings. The settings in the profiles have been tested very well, and perform robust if your machine is in order. Have you had any incidents with PVA with the BB nozzle? I mean, a period where there was little or no flow, and the nozzle was hot? PVA deteriorates quickly, and your BB print core can be partly blocked. That gives underextrusion, which hurts your first layer. I notice that the support is printed with squares, while I think the default in all profiles is "triangles". So my guess is that you don't use the default settings.

The problem is most probably caused by your bed being too high. When the probing starts, the bed is already against the nozzle, or too close. We decided to shorten the active leveling procedure by starting closer to the nozzle. A bed that is set nominally starts 2.5mm (by heart) from the nozzle. At least 0.5mm distance is required at the start. So a bed may be 2mm higher than nominal. Lower your bed by using the knurled nuts under the bed, and you will probably see it works again. The nominal position of the bed: there is 14mm distance between the top of the base plate and the bottom of the heater plate.

I understand your response. I am very sorry for this, we are dedicated in providing a good product. Your expectation of superior product quality is entirely appropriate.

Unfortunately, we have used a batch of slider blocks that were made from PC-ABS, and it should have been ABS. Really frustrating, and probably partly our own fault. Not all printers are affected, but obviously too many. Our resellers will do everything they can to help everyone. We're really sorry for this.

Did you upgrade your printer to firmware v3.5 already? It contains an improvement to the Active Leveling software, which in some situations will give a more accurate result. Beware: Active leveling has also been made a little quicker, by starting higher. If you have manually leveled your bed more than 2mm higher than nominally, it fails. Nominal position: 14mm distance between top of base plate and bottom of heaterplate.

So lowering the glass plate with the screws was the solution to your second problem? And your printer was brand new? Did you touch the thumbscrews before?

This is what Stratasys publishes for one of their professional systems. It gives a lot of info, but still I have many questions. Why not publish the drawing of the object that they have actually measured? What dimensions were measured? http://www.stratasys.com/~/media/Main/Secure/White-Papers/WP_FDM_Fortus360mc400mcAccuracyStudy.pdf?la=fr

The combination of Cura with all the quality profiles and the UM3 and the Ultimaker materials is thoroughly tested. You will get excellent results in terms of print quality and reliability. Ultimaker sells an open system, and you can choose to use other filaments. No problem with me, but often that means you have to spend time on optimising print settings and dealing with failed prints, because materials from different suppliers have different properties.

Out of curiosity: what exactly do you find bad on their results?

We have done limited testing with BuildTak, and found it to be working fine with our Active leveling software. Can you tell me what goes wrong? You use the newest firmware, which does 6 probes (3 times with each nozzle). Is there *at least* 0.5mm distance between buildtak surface and the nozzle when each probe starts? If you doubt this, lower the bed with the screws a little. The probing is done with hot nozzles, because any material residues on the nozzle must be squashed during probing. This may leave marks on your buildtak surface. The answer to your question is: you cannot. Either you use active leveling, or you do manual leveling. You cannot do active leveling, and enter an offset somewhere.

* use Ultimaker materials * use Cura in recommended mode ("Consigliata"), stay away from advanced mode, but use the default quality profiles. If you have altered settings, use "discard all changes" in the quality profiles dropdownbox to go to default settings. Print quality should then be very good. If you have done the above, maybe a video will help in judging what is wrong.

please contact your reseller, because you have a problem with your wifi board.

This feature is built into Cura. I believe from another post that you use another slicer, right? Maybe you can build this "forbidden zone" into your slicer. But of course I recommend to switch to Cura. Do you print with PVA as well? Cura contains smart features with nozzle temperature control which is essential for PVA reliability.

I very much like to help you, but I don't understand what your (main) problem is. I see a lot of stringing. Is that your problem? Or is it the shifted layers at the side of your print? Try to describe your problem please.

It may be caused by the glass plate already hitting the nozzle at the start of the probing. Please have a look closely on what happens in your printer during the probes. During probing you hear the z-motor humming, and the bed slowly goes up. there should be at least 1 second/0.5mm between the start of this humming sound and the glass hitting the nozzle. The new firmware starts the probing process higher. This makes it faster, but the drawback is that if the glass is set too high, this error pops up. Use the 3 screws below your bed to lower the glass if it hits the nozzle too soon. 1mm should be enough.

XY nozzle movement has a resolution of 12.5microns. Z movement has a resolution of 2.5 microns. But you probably figured that out already. The UM3 currently only features 0.4mm nozzles, other sizes will follow. The size of your nozzle party determines feature size, very much depending on what you want to print. The slicer will play a big role too. If you need a wallthickness of 0.6 and you use the 0.4mm nozzle, I think the slicer will give you 1 wall of 0.4mm. You may not like that. There are many error sources. In mechanics there is Eccentric pulleys, not-straight shafts, steppermotor non-lineairity, in electronics we have stepperdriver non-linearity. And then there is influence of materials and printing process: warpage and/or material shrinkage. And there is influence of the software: e.g. the slicer will make a circle from many straight lines, which makes holes a little bit smaller. Etc. Etc. Some errors may hurt you, some will not. I can design a test like FormLabs for the Ultimaker in which some error sources will not show up. That makes the UM look good. Or should I design a test in which all errors do show up? That makes UM look bad, and maybe worse than you will see in practice. If you could share some typical designs you want to print, together with info on what features are important to you, we may be able to tell you whether or not the UM3 is able to perform according to your wishes.