gr5

See my video here. Yes it's long at 20 minutes but to answer your question fully takes 20 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t58-WTxDy-k

As you can see in picture below. Make sure you select these 2 things and "helpers" is checked.

I'm thinking it has to do with the corner of your print where it changes layers. Instead of rotating the print try changing the corner. Layer Start X Layer Start Y If zero I think it defaults to back right corner?

Well it can't write to that file. That file is the cura program itself. So here are some possibilities: 1) The most common - when I see that error - is that the program is running (cura is running). I'd launch task manager and make sure Cura isn't running. Also go to that folder c:\Program Files\Ultimaker Cura 4.9.1\ see if the folder exists and see if Cura.exe is in it . If so then try to delete the file. If you can't delete it, particularly as administrator, then something has the program open. Worst case - reboot and try to delete it again. The installer can't create Cura.exe (cura itself - the main program) if it's locked because it's currently running or open for some other reason. 2) Well maybe the file doesn't exist - maybe you don't have privilege to write to that folder. Maybe run the installer as administrator - right click the setup and choose "run as administrator"

I loaded your project and see what you mean. I tried everything I could think of. I even tried a different version of Cura. If you set horizontal expansion to 0.1mm you can see that it's filling the wall gap. Here's the basic problem I think: Cura always has to do an even number of passes. The red lines are the outer shell passes and then it does 2 inner shell passes. So you could set your nozzle width to 0.3mm (0.3 * 4 = 1.2mm perfectly) then it does it nicely. And it will print reasonably well but the quality might be slightly worse (not better) than what you are doing now. Or better - you can make the inner passes more equal - set the "wall thickness" to 0.6 (half of your 1.2) and make the outer wall 0.4 and inner wall 0.2mm. 0.4+0.2+0.2+0.4 = 1.2mm. You could also try the beta version of cura 5.0, code named Arachne. It will (I believe) do an odd number of passes on walls which is what you need. I have not tried Arachne.

Greg is talking about this thread:

@GregValiant - maybe you can do a github pull request?

If you care about bridging the most then you should only ask about bridging. I look at all your prints and they look pretty normal/typical except for the bridging pictures. I think you should ignore all issues except your bridging issue. Concentrate on one issue at a time. I believe I gave you zero help on bridging yet that was your most serious problem and now 5 days have gone by. Bridging will be worse close to the hot glass. I would be tempted to turn off the heat on the bed and use blue painters tape on the glass and re-level the bed (now with tape). But most importantly, wash the blue tape with isopropyl alcohol. There are a LOT of bridiging settings - particularly in the "experimental" section of cura - those features were added by a non-ultimaker person here on the forum named "burtoogle" who still actively works on cura but is not active on this forum anymore. Google "site:ultimaker.com burtoogle bridge" and read all the posts by burtoogle. He is the expert on bridging. I think a very important bridge setting is "skin flow" (skin is that first layer of bridging that is most important). If your bridge strings are snapping then you want to increase flow. If they are drooping you want to decrease flow. It looks like if you enable these settings it defaults to 50% flow.

Did you check that the *filament* settings in cura are set to 1.75mm. Not the machine settings. Not the profile settings. The *filament* settings. In cura.

You have to tell cura what kinds of filament the printer will accept - that's in machine settings. Then the filament itself has settings. That's more critical. The filament selected has to match what you actually use. If you think you did it right then you can look at any two successive gcodes that include X,Y,E values. Knowing the layer height multiply line width X layer height X distance (use distance formula knowing the from and to point in X,Y distance). That gets you the *volume* of filament you want to extrude in cubic mm. To translate to E value for 1.75mm filament you divide that volume just calculated by the cross sectional area of the filament (pi r squared) or 2.4 square mm. So you could test that Cura is doing it right before trying to print the gcode. I mean there are over 500 parameters in cura and many could be messing you up. Such as "flow" settings. Or it's possible the E values are perfect and your printer has something wrong with it. Or you are just printing too cold and too fast.

I was thinking something similar but I'm not familiar with these translate things nor machine settings that are in python or json files.

Go to left side of screen in PREPARE mode. Click on your printer, then do "manage printers" then "machine settings", Uncheck "origin at center". Also check the dimensions of your bed - for example, if it says your bed is 100mm wide but it is actually 200mm wide then it will be printing on the left half of your print bed.

That is severe underextrusion. Something isn't set up right. For example you may have cura slicing for 3mm filament yet you may be using 1.75mm filament (that's a common error right there). What kind of printer is it?

Well you seem very picky on the thinness of the part in the first photo. The only way to fix that for a print that uses the whole build surface is to get a flatter print bed. So you can complain to your reseller and hope for a free one. You might get one even worse than it is now. If you can get your reseller to open 10 glass beds and test each one then one of them is bound to be better than what you have but... not too many (if any) resellers would be willing to do this. You can try to level the glass yourself with shims under the glass to bend up some of the corners. Or you can pre-bend the metal plate under the glass (it only takes an ounce or so of pressure to deform the glass at the outer edges). Or you can by some regular plate glass (which is much flatter - Ultimaker uses tempered glass which isn't great on flatness). I went the "pre-bend" route but after I did that I realized I could have easily cracked/ruined the heated bed on the other side. In retrospect I'm glad I didn't know as I put a LOT of force on that aluminum plate to get it to bend slightly.

"bridging" in 3d printing... If you are printing a wall with a door or window opening - when you get to the top of the door/window - it "bridges" across the top. It's when it is printing a layer where it bridges from one wall to the other to cover up some hole below. You aren't doing that in your "bridging" photo. So I'm confused. Maybe you are talking about "stringing" which is when the printer prints but you don't want it to and you get strings/threads.

Steppers are mostly indestructable and never fail. Stepper drivers fail all the time. Plus if a stepper driver overheats it just shuts off for a little while (anywhere from a fraction of a second to a few seconds). A clogged nozzle or simply printing too fast may look like a broken stepper as the stepper can miss a step and zip backwards. If you can video the problem happening that will help us with diagnosis. I hope the replacements fix the issue!

Well I'm suspicious of Z axis from your description but I'd rather see a picture of your print. Sometimes you can have a printer where the Z axis moves different amounts every other layer. Make sure your layer height is EXACTLY the same in the 2 slicers. One might have 0.2mm layer height and the other 0.21mm layer height because maybe the 0.21 lines up better with the internal stepper resolution. Or maybe the Z movement speed is different between the 2 slicers. Or Z acceleration might be set to a different value in one of the slicers (normally Z acceleration is not set in Cura but maybe it is in the other slicer). Or maybe you didn't slice the exact same STL and it's an issue with an overhang - like the bow of benchy - it's normal for the nozzle to hit the print (HARD!) on the bow of Benchy.

Sorry you are unhappy. If you post 3 questions on this forum you will almost always get only one answer. So consider breaking this out into 3 posts. I have no idea what you are trying to say in the first photo. Okay I looked a 3rd time - I have an idea - how many layers have you printed here? 3? Are you talking about how thin the bottom layer is? Some glass aren't flat. They can be thinner towards the outer edges. That doesn't look too unreasonable. Bridging and stringing works differently that close to a heated bed. The bed should be at 60C for PLA. Is that really a bridging test or a stringing test? I don't understand if the bottom print is better (better bridging) or worse (worse stringing) and what you did differently between the top and bottom part. White filaments (not just PLA but all filaments) string more for me. So you picked the toughest filament to work with. I think they add chalk or something and it just doesn't print as well as darker colors like gray, blue, red, etc. Wait until you print black which shows up "errors" that are hard to see in white filament. Tiny changes in slope that can't be measured with a micrometer suddenly show up visually when you hold it to the light in the right angle. Elephants foot I fix by using "initial Horizontal Expansion" at -0.25mm. That is a bad idea for certain rare parts but 95% of the time it works great. Elephants foot is two issues - one is that you are leveling the nozzle "too close" to the bed but you want that - you want really good adhesion and one of the key things to get your part to stick to the bed is to squish it quite well. So I squish quite well and then compensate with IHE. The sticking issue is also horizontal expansion related. everything is a tradeoff. UM3 default profiles are for parts to look pretty. UM2 default profiles are tuned more for accuracy but not 100%. You will get better looking and more accurate This last part I would tune. It's the only thing you mention that I found I need to tune. I would play with "horizontal expansion" to get it to print this last part correctly. It appears you need to set it to -0.6 to get these parts to "not stick" but that seems crazy. I've never had to set it to a value larger in magnitude than -0.15. Maybe just print a little slower and 5C cooler. Ultimaker published these improved accuracy values - called "engineering profile" (not available for most printers so you have to just modify the settings manually). Note that this makes uglier prints (more ringing) but more accurate prints if you pull out the micrometer. Also this makes for slower prints - particularly the combing setting and speed settings. Disable jerk control - these are for UM3/S3/S5 where most profiles have jerk and acceleration control. I advise against enabling those for UM2 printers (doesn't need it and it will just make accuracy worse). Line width: 0.4 Wall thickness: 1.2 Top/Bottom thickness: 1.2 Speeds: 35-40 (first 7 speeds, all except travel) Jerks: 20 Horizontal expansion: -0.03 walls: 3 Inital Layer Height = 0.1 Slicing Tolerance = Exclusive Combing Mode = off Outer before Inner Walls = Checked

PETG typically prints at 220C. You can go into the TUNE menu on your S5 after you start the print and adjust the nozzle temp. I think it's in the "..." menu in the upper right corner. Or you can just set the nozzle temperature in Cura. For PETG on my S5 I have been telling Cura that it's CPE and adjusting only the temperatures in the profile. When I load the PETG I tell the S5 it's CPE as well. If you are getting clogging with 3rd party PLA - first of all - are you sure it's PLA? Put a bit of "PLA" filament in a coffee cup with hot water in it. Measure the temp. PLA should be soft like clay in the 52-60C range. If you bend the filament it stays in the new position when hotter than 52C. PETG and other materials pretty much all are stiff/strong below 70C. If it's still having trouble printing - try real PLA - if it's having trouble with that then something is wrong with your printer and we can discuss that next. Most likely I'd say is the fan in the print head door (not the side 2 print head fans).

I have to rotate pretty much every part anyway. When I'm in CAD I usually have many parts in one assembly but each part prints best at a different rotation.

@merph you misunderstand - most printers have an STL file that describes the printer itself. I can see from your screenshot that you don't have this. Basically you can just rotate the bed so that origin symbol is in the far right corner. Then start placing your parts down. Maybe GregValiant has some better ideas. He has an Ender.

@GregValiant - do you know how to rotate the build plate around 180 so that Cura puts the origin symbol in the back right corner? We talked about this about a month ago but I forget what the conclusion was. Is there some way to modify his ender5 machine configuration by editing the json file or something?

I took a look. The normals for the letters are all backwards. Facing in towards the air in each letter instead of in towards the plastic. In STL files it's an unordered list of triangles and each triangle has a "normal" which tells the slicer which side of each triangle faces plastic and which side faces air. You have it backwards. Cura gets confused and thinks the letters should be filled in. Blender has a feature to fix the normals - You can also install the cura mesh tools and fix the normals that way but I recommend fixing them in blender.

This sounds very strange. Did you look at the Z positions in the gcode? There should be only one Z move per layer. I hope. Look at the Z values and see if they make sense. Also look at the E values to make sure the extruder keeps extruding. Also look at the Z speeds. There was a bug where some printers didn't have a speed for the Z movement (or was it E movement?) and Cura defaulted to the speed of light. Which the printer freaked out over. Speeds are after the letter "F". You can search for all the F values and make sure they are all under a million. Anyway, the point is, look at the gcodes and try to figure out exactly what is happening. Narrow down the problem to something more specific.

So your printer should have a mesh associated with it that describes things other than the print bed. Like clips on the print bed and maybe the back of the printer. It's probably an STL file? You could take the file, rotate everything 180 degrees and then replace that mesh file. What kind of printer do you have (or what is the printer called in Cura?)