gr5

Well Nylon is much more flexible and that can be a problem in certain situations. When buying Rit dye it shouldn't cost more than $2 to $4 per bottle. I've seen it much more expensive so shop around a little.

I don't think you can. It's usually a good thing - it prevents the nozzle from leaking while it moves to the start of the skirt or brim. Then it does an E0 which undoes that retraction and then it starts printing the skirt or brim. If you take out the E-2 it will leak a bit and there will be less filament for when it starts printing the skirt/brim.

That looks fine. You appear to have a VERY thick layer height. Maybe 2mm? Try a layer height of 0.2mm.

Just to be clear - you launch cura and cura is visible on your screen. Correct? And then you click on the "file" menu and choose "open files", right? Then you navigate to the STL file and select and open it that way? This really matters. There are a dozen other ways to open an STL. For example you can drag and drop the STL file into the cura window. 1) The more description you give the better. There are so many ways to open a file. Also the problem you are describing sounds unique (I don't think anyone else has had the problem you have). Anyway if the answer to all the questions is Yes then please answer in full sentences: yes, cura launched and I saw the application start up and it has it's own screen. Stuff like that. Otherwise we may be chasing the wrong problem. You see it's very common for cura not to start at all but once it starts it is rare that it won't open an STL file. Please give as much effort trying to explain the problem as we are giving to ask you questions. So make sure cura is in PREPARE mode and not PREVIEW mode. Maybe the file is in cura but it refuses to slice? 2) Does the blue "slice" button appear in the lower right corner after you open the STL file? My next thoughts are: 3) Even though you say the STL opened before with older cura, please post it here. 4) Please post the log file. You can find the log file in cura by going to the "help" menu in cura. If you can't get to the help menu then that says a lot as well!

If you are painting these things black - know that you can buy "natural" nylon filament (it's probably the most common nylon filament option) and dye it. It comes out looking amazing when you dye it. It shocks me every damn time. Nylon is good at absorbing water or oil both so you can use almost any kind of paint supposedly but dye is so much easier. https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Dye-Your-Nylon-3D-Prints/ I always skip the soaking step and it comes out just fine. Better than just fine. I have only done black dye and it's... amazing. I mix the dye with boiling hot water in a glass container and dip the part for 6 minutes.

This still holds up as the best CAD advice - answer the questions and you will find the best CAD for you.

For strength you want those clips sideways like in the picture. For beauty and print speed and saving filament (and so you need zero support) you want to print the flat side to the print bed. You can do both. Separate those clips as separate prints and glue them together, or screw them together. You could embed a nut into the circular part as it prints (pause at layer) or you could just have a hole that is the right size so that a metal screw self taps into the round part (that's what I'd do). Also I'd make those clips something much tougher (less brittle) than PLA. As a minimum I'd use tough PLA but more likely I'd use Nylon. Yes it's much harder to print but evenually you would learn to print those clips perfectly every time and you can print 20 at a time in Nylon then switch to PLA. Nylon is super tough - you can drive over those clips with a car no problem (if they are nylon). Printing on edge like that will greatly reduce quality as the round part will wobble up until the moment the clips are connected to the support towers. So quality won't be so good on the 40 layers up to the clips and then suddenly it will get good again and it will just look a little off. Better to make the design super good if you are printing lots of these (more than 10).

Oh, right! Maybe this one: "support Z distance". Try setting that to zero. Or maybe something else - post the project file and we can figure it out quickly. Are you doing PVA support? Don't answer that - just send us the project file and we can see for ourselves.

So your object probably doesn't have a flat bottom. One end is around 0.2 to 0.4mm lower than the circular part. One solution is to fix it in cad. Another is to go into "preferences" "config cura" and uncheck "automatically drop models...". Then click on the part and select the move tool on the left and enter -0.5 for the Z position and reslice. This will chop off the bottom 0.5mm of your part which is hopefully not a big deal.

To do that do "File" "save project..."

Choose "print thin walls" in Cura and you should be able to print 1mm walls no problem.

I'd replace the power supply. If it's still under warranty I'd ask for a power supply from the reseller. Most metals, including the one used in the Ultimaker heated bed, have a higher resistance as the temp gets higher so it uses less power. Your bed heater uses more power at lower temps. But not enough to cause the power brick to fail until other things come on (servos). I've seen these power bricks fail many times - they are all a little different. They have sophisticated computers that detect over current, over voltage, over heating. They typically turn off the 24V power only for a portion of a second which causes the computers in the printer to reboot. Another thing to try - check the resistance on the X and Y axes. Higher resitance uses more power by the steppers (I used to think that wasn't true but I proved by putting a current meter on the printer and fighting against the print head movement). Maybe add a drop of oil to each of the 4 thick and 2 thin rods in the gantry. But basically I'd get a new power brick. Around $100 on ebay/amazon/etc I'm not sure exactly which power brick the UM2+C uses. Probably this one: GST220A24-R7B If you have the above one, the below one is almost identical but can put out about 20% more power in my experience (even though the specs written on the supply are identical): GS220A24-R7B Ultimaker doesn't like it because it has fewer safety features and doesn't pass CE I think. Maybe that's the reason.

Make sure to add the length of your bowden to this length!

If you set the cura wall setting to 8mm - it won't make any difference on your model. Your walls are not thick enough. They'd have to be at least 16mm thick before you get all 8mm shell passes on each side of the wall. In other words you'd have to make your current walls about 20X thicker! It would do those 8mm walls using 20 0.4mm passes.

Is it PLA? I hope it's PLA. There are lots of ways to clean these but cold pull is the easiest. I know you said you did that. Here's what to do - somethin in these instructions is bound to be different. However if you have a 0.22mm hypodermic or accupuncture needle it helps quite a bit (if you are in USA I sell them cheap). temps are for PLA a) remove bowden on print head. Push the head to the corner so you don't bend the rods. b) Heat the core to 180C. c) Push a piece of filament (around 5-10 inches or 10-20cm) in through the top and down through the trumpet. Push pretty hard - like 20 pounds of force (lift something that weighs 10kg/20 pounds for a reference). You can stop pushing as the temp falls below 120C d) cool to 90C. While it cools maintain a few pounds (1kg) of pressure. e) when it reaches 90C pull up. Hard. Hard enough that you have to hold the printer down from lifting off the table with the other hand (again - important that head is in corner so you don't bend rods). If it won't come out, set the temp to 105C. Take a rest for 2 seconds but before temp reaches 100C start pulling again. Hard. If it still won't come out try 110C. If the PLA comes out easily then you didn't go cold enough. Do steps b through e but instead of 90C go 5C colder If the PLA won't come out at all obviously you raise temp. Ideally you get the shape of the inside of the nozzle - including the 0.25mm diameter final hole. Yes it's not that hard normally to get that as well. Some other tricks. Some people go down to room temp and twist the PLA. Or you can try 80C and twist/pull at the same time. I don't normally do this but it seems to work well. Other tricks: While it's at 180C push a needle through the tip of the nozzle - the idea is to push any clog (think grain of sand) up into the plastic in the main chamber of the nozzle to make the cold pull work easy. You can disassemble the core and separate the nozzle and burn everything out. Try not to get it cherry red hot (around 500-600C). But get it hot enough that it smokes and/or flames. Stop adding heat if it flames. Do a cold pull after to get out all the ash and newly generated chemicals. There's a video I posted on how to disassemble a UM core on youtube. Search for "UM3 core disassembly" If you get the brass over a certain temp it will be weaker afterwards. But that's mostly fine. It's a little easier to damage the brass if you overtighten the nozzle when putting it back together. But it's still reasonably strong. Much stronger than plastic.

The nozzle is 0.4mm for your printer most likely (not 4mm - that would be massive). So Cura, when slicing always used to make it mandatory that walls were double the line width - or it wouldn't slice the walls at all. The "print thin walls" option allows cura to print smaller walls - down to I think the line width (0.4mm typically). Or maybe it's a little larger - I'm not sure. Let's get some terms: cura wall - that's not the thickness of the wall of your model. Let's say your model is of a cube that is say 20mm on a side. Cura doesn't print the center solid - it uses an "infill" pattern. Typically it fills the inside with 20% plastic in some pattern. The wall setting in cura is how much solid loops it makes around the inside of the cube. It does that thickness of the wall on both sides. So if your cube is 20mm on a side and wall is set to 2mm then that leaves 16mm in the middle (20 minus 2 minus 2). When people say "wall" they may mean one of quite a few different things. The wall of a cube is different then the wall of your model which is very very thin. "print thin walls" is talking about thin walls in your model (not the cura wall setting). Oh dear - I may be making this more confusing. I think you'll eventually understand through experience.

I got it to slice if I set line width to 0.4mm and check the box "print thin walls" but this is going to be very delicate. I think you might want to make it a bit thicker. Try making walls 0.8mm thick in fusion (and still check the "print thin walls" checkbox) and I think it will be strong enough for your needs. I'm just guessing as I don't know how strong it needs to be.

1) I think you have an issue with your Z axis. I think it slipped too far vertically. This is a very common problem among 3d printers and could be caused by dirt in the z screw or lower quality parts - either znut, zscrew, vertical rods, vertical bearings. I could be wrong - it's possible the extruder stopped extruding for a layer. These gaps can also be caused by bad layer adhesion and cooling/warping but then the gap would be a different thickness in different locations. So I don't think it's that. Is this the type of printer where the Bed moves down as it prints? Or the type of printer where the nozzle moves up? If the former then try putting a weight (a brick?) on the print bed. At least 1 kg. To see if it moves more uniformly. If you have a problem with clogging (common with ABS) then you need to either print faster (e.g. change layer height to 0.2mm) or cooler. I recommend faster. Every printer is different so ignore what other people say is the best printing temp for ABS. The best temp is different for every printer. 2) Why ABS? ABS is difficult for MANY reasons. PLA is 1000X more popular for good reasons - it doesn't clog so easily, it doesn't need a heated chamber, it doesn't warp and split as easily as ABS and most importantly PLA doesn't clog easily. The only property I can think of that is better than PLA is temperature resistance. PLA gets soft at about 52C and ABS gets soft at about 99C. If you need a higher temp material there is nGen, PETG, CPE which get soft around 70C to 80C depending on the material. nGen, PETG, CPE are much much easier to print than ABS. They print almost as easily as PLA. Also ABS smells bad when you print it. Really bad. Not a problem with the other materials I mention. I'd throw away the whole spool of ABS. Or give it to your enemy as a "gift". The problems you are having here are not even the most common problems. Wait until you discover the really annoying issues of ABS! Then you will *really* learn to hate ABS.

You simply change "line width" setting in Cura. I recommend starting with 0.25mm line width. In general you can do 75% to 150% of any nozzle size so 0.2mm to 0.35 should be a reasonable range. But stick to 0.25 if that is a reasonable accuracy for you. Take note there are many line widths. Make sure you aware of them all (just type "line" in the settings search box and relevant settings will suddenly appear even if they aren't normally visible). I recommend infill line widths are the same. Changing line widths mid print is "bad" because you will then get a brief overextrusion or underextrusion until the pressure in the nozzle equalizes.

We prefer not to delete postings like this as they can help other people with similar questions. In fact your post is particularly informative.

If you don't mind losing all your old settings, I'd delete all that and then restart cura (absolutely no need to reinstall). Cura puts settings I think in 2 locations and I forget which location you need to delete. You can google around on this forum (if you say site:ultimaker.com google only gives you results from this website and that's mostly this forum). Anyway I think it's all here but if this doesn't work google around for the other folder: %APPDATA%\cura\ (Windows), or usually C:\Users\\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\cura\ Delete all versions. Cura 4.8 tries to load your old profiles from older versions and that can cause a crash. After you do all that if it still doesn't work and you have two monitors try unplugging one monitor before launching. If all that doesn't work grab the log file here: %APPDATA%\cura\<Cura version>\cura.log (Windows), or usually C:\Users\\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\cura\<Cura version>\cura.log

Have you ever installed older versions of Cura?

It's unlikely to be the stepper motor but possible. Particularly if you enclosed the printer with enough insulation to get the air temp well over 40C. If you feel more friction in the Y axis than the left axis then that is definitely the problem. You need to start taking everything apart in the gantry and figure this out. Actually first thing - check that the two smaller diameter rods going through the print head are perpendicular. Sometimes a belt skips a tooth. There are great videos and descriptions showing how to take the gantry apart. Look around. Don't try it without watching a video first as this will save you hours. I helped one school fix their printer that had too much friction on one axis. One of the rods had some kind of gunk on it - I think maybe hairspray. I had to try many solvents before I got it clean and moving again. I also had to take apart one sliding block and remove the rod and use a hammer and vice to unstick it.

it should be fine. There's a margin of error.

Actually I think maybe the filament is too dry. Some UM PVA filaments (my spools of PVA are fine by the way) are too brittle and can crack in the bowden. I've heard good things about aquasys water soluble filaments but never tried it.