gr5

Sketchup and Maya seem to be the two CAD programs that have a lot of trouble making solids. When you merged these parts it kept the inner walls (which shouldn't exist). The red means there is an odd number of walls passed through if you trace a line from your eye to the red areas and beyond. That should never happen. never. It means it's not a solid. I don't know maya so I'm not sure how you fix this. Did you try slicing it anyway to see what it looks like in preview mode? You can experiment also with the "mesh repair" options in cura. Or you can repair this in netfabb (you have to create a free account to repair an STL file on netfabbs website but it works very well). I recommend you ask a Maya expert what you did wrong.

See the red circle with the line through it? See all the check boxes? It's telling you that you don't have PVA loaded in the second extruder. If you *do* have PVA loaded then just tell it that before you try to print. Hit the middle (not top or bottom) tab on the left side, click on the top right where it says the filament type and in the top right corner with the "..." select PVA. Don't let it auto choose the filament - just tell it that it's pva.

In the USA, you can get a bowden (and it probably comes with clips) from fbrc8.com (who assembled your Ultimaker) or you can get S5 bowden's from me at thegr5store.com. When not printing (in other words when there is not a lot of pressure on the filament from the feeder) if the bowden jiggles up and down even .5mm then you need the clip (or you need to add this distance to the retraction distance in cura). If it stays in place then you don't need the clip. There are tricks for inserting the bowden in such a way that you don't need the clip but they cost something like 10 per penny plus you can print one as you said.

The teflon part from 3dsolex or Ultimaker lasts much longer than the ones from China and elsewhere. They use a special kind of teflon that can handle higher heat. You should be replacing the teflon part roughly every 500 hours of printing. There is an odometer-like feature where you can see how many hours your printer has printed in the menu system. Ultimaker considers the teflon part a "consumable". Like filament. And it's much cheaper than filament. Ultimaker purposely sells this at a very reasonable price because they feel that consumables should be at an affordable price.

Do the tower thing I talked about. Why didn't you do the tower? It makes a HUGE difference. It's easy. You just need a cube and you can resize the cube in cura with the scale feature (unlock the 3 axes so you can make it 10mmX10mmXslightly_taller_than_model When you go to print the hole thing to make it only 10mm on a side or it might fall over. As a general rule towers should be 1/5 as wide as they are tall to not fall over (to be nice and safe).

First of all PLA and TPLA are 99.99% the same thing as far as I'm concerned. It's like water versus water with food coloring. They have very similar temperature characteristics, same melting point, same softening point, they act the same in almost every way except the TPLA is slightly more flexible and slightly weaker. This makes it quite a bit tougher. So definitely one core for both of those is fine. So I swap between nylon and pla with the same core all the time. I already swapped twice today. It's really not a big deal. When I switch to PLA however I don't tell the printer that it's not nylon right away - just slide out the nylon, slide in the pla, then do "move material" and wait until all the nylon seems to be gone. Only then do I select "pla" as the "current" material. I do this because I feel you need the higher temp to get most of the nylon out of the nozzle. I don't print much TPU so I can't really speak to that but changing cores all the time seems a bit silly. I have used the same core for maybe 8 different materials including PP, ABS, PLA, TPU, Nylon, CPE As far as I can tell the cores last forever. I've had a few cores that I've used for I think about 2 years now? They are build very well and will probably never wear out - they just might snap at the heatbreak some day - other than that I expect them to last years.

To see the brim make sure you are in color scheme "line type" and make sure "helpers" checkbox is checked. As far as extrusion - this is a complicated issue and feeder issues can look like nozzle clogs - it's hard to tell the difference. Ask people about your printer on a forum for your particular printer (or on facebook, or reddit). For example Prusa printers have their own forum. Ultimaker printers have this forum.

Vertical slots or horizontal slots? If they are horizontal slots you can play with the "horizontal expansion" parameter and set that to a negative value. Also make sure the slots are visible in cura preview before printing anything. If the slots are on the bottom layer this is the hardest layer to control to that precision. You will need to mess with the "initial layer horizontal expansion" and level the machine extremely carefully (to 0.02mm accuracy potentially which is very difficult). But it is possible to create 0.1mm slots. Showing us a picture of your model may help us understand better.

Please show a photo of the "melted top". Otherwise, the advice you get here is often useless. For parts with small top layers (like the top of the eiffel tower for example) we indeed get melting issues where the PLA never gets a chance to cool enough (not a problem for other materials as they are all higher temperature). The best solution is to print a tower next to your part that is taller. When the head moves over to the tower the part gets a few more seconds to cool. Alternatively I will print 2 or three of the same part. Position the tower left or right of your part (assuming your fan(s) are on the side) such that the fan is hopefully blowing on the part while printing the tower.

Note that the problem might still be there with wood fill as wood fill is good at hiring layer lines and imperfections like this. Please experiment. No need to print the whole cube - just the bottom few layers. I still suspect it's something with the Z screw. Try tightening the 3 leveling screws the same amount - quite a bit - maybe 5 full turns. If the problem then moves up 5 or 10 layers then it was the screw.

@burtoogle wrote that code (yet he doesn't work for Ultimaker - interesting, eh?) so hopefully he can shed some light on this.

This happens a lot. There are 2 likely possibilities but the most likely is that you have the wrong firmware. The UM2 firmware rotates backwards from the UM2+ firmware. So make sure you have the white UM2+ feeder and install the "plus" firmware. Or if you have the black feeder then install the UM2 plain firmware.

Your idea about printing one island for many layers and then going back down and printing the next island... I've thought about that before. For two well separated towers of course it would work fine. But most things you print may have dozens of regions/islands and some may be very close together. So the printer would need to know the shape of the bottom cm of the entire print head including fans, shrouds, heater blocks, etc. And it would have to do lots of 3D checking to make sure there was no collision with parts of the print head with each island to print. This calculation is done for 5 and 6 axis printing which is rare in 3d printing - mostly just subtractive manufacturing (milling machines). The software/math for this is much harder and would make the slicer much slower but it would be great if Cura could do it. While they are at it please make Cura capable of 5 axis printing! Right now I think most people do 5 axis build paths using CAD tools like autocad. I don't think there is a single 5 axis slicer out there. I keep mentioning 5 axis printing because the math and planning is very similar to what you want. So if you have the software to do one, you should be able to adapt it for the other.

Which other's? You don't have to answer that. Speed helps the most. Printing speed. If you print at half speed there will be half as much pressure in the nozzle when printing and you are much less likely to leak. But the speed of the travel should be as fast as possible (Ultimaker printers can usually go to 300mm/sec just fine for travel speed) Also internal nozzle shape - for a 0.4mm nozzle, the longer that 0.4mm channel is, the less likely it will leak. Material makes a big difference. I find that white filaments string much more. For retraction distance you want just enough to relieve pressure without actually allowing any air into the nozzle which causes even more stringing. Keep in mind that I categorize stringing into two types. The bad stringing look like thin horizontal threads. The good stringing is when the threads are so thin you can't really see them but you get these tiny, curved/wavy vertical towers that tend to start at both ends and move away from the parts. These extra thin strings aren't really much of a problem is they are so easy to remove. 2 seconds of work with fingers can remove hundreds at a time. A little heat from a flame can also make most of them seemingly vanish (in actuality they shrink).

Yes but you are going to tear your adhesion sheet very often anyway so it's not as wonderful as you might think. Also you can print on both sides of the glass if you want. If you use PVA glue I'm not sure that it makes a difference which side you print on. I've printed on both sides of the glass on 4 of my 7 UM printers (so far) because after a year or so I usually manage to chip the glass. It might make a difference but I haven't noticed.

When you replaced the heater block did you replace the teflon part. That's the part that fails most often. Especially if you printed any ABS at all as it fails faster at higher temperatures. I sell them cheap in my store (full disclosure - I sell UM parts) but only to people in USA. thegr5store.com Definitely do the feeder test first as it's so easy and eliminates so many issues and narrows things down. It takes me all of 10 seconds to do as I've done it so many times now and I don't need a scale to do it anymore. Anyway here is a complete list of things that cause underextrusion on the UM2: One can quickly check the feeder (it takes seconds) so I would always do that first. The feeder on UM2+ and UM2 can push with 10 pounds (5kg) force easily so first thing is to lift that lever (if um2+, if um2 regular do move material) and insert filament so it is only part way into the bowden (e.g. half way). Then move the filament with "move material" command in menu so the feeder is energized and then pull down on the filament under the feeder. You should be able to pull with 5 to 10 pounds force without it slipping. Then have it move the material up while you pull down. 5 pounds force (2kg) is enough to make decent prints at moderate speeds listed below but you need 10 pounds (5kg) to print fast (e.g. 0.2mm layers and 60mm/sec) As far as underextrusion causes - there's just so damn many. none of the issues seem to cause more than 20% of problems so you need to know the top 5 issues to cover 75% of the possibilities and 1/4 people still won't have the right issue. Some of the top issues: 1) Print slower and hotter! Here are top recommended speeds for .2mm layers (twice as fast for .1mm layers) and .4mm nozzle: 20mm/sec at 200C 30mm/sec at 210C 40mm/sec at 225C 50mm/sec at 240C The printer can do double these speeds but with huge difficulty and usually with a loss in part quality due to underextrusion. Different colors print best at quite different temperatures and due to imperfect temp sensors, some printers print 10C cool so use these values as an initial starting guideline and if you are still underextruding try raising the temp. But don't go over 240C with PLA. 2) Shell width confusion. Shell width must be a multiple of nozzle size (in cura 15.X. In cura 2.X it doesn't matter as much but still makes a difference). For example if nozzle size is .4mm and shell width is 1mm cura will make the printer do 2 passes with .5mm line width which is possible but requires you to slow down much more to make a .5mm line out of a .4mm nozzle. If you really want this then set nozzle size to .5mm so it's clear what you are asking Cura to do for you. 3) Isolator - this is most common if you've printed extra hot (>240C) for a few hours or regular temps (220C) for 500 hours. It gets soft and compresses the filament under pressure. It's the white part touching the heater block. It's very hard to test when not under full pressure (spring and bowden) so sometimes it's best to just replace it. Also if you notice parts of it are very soft (the blacker end where it touches higher heat) then it's too old and needs replacing. 4) Curved filament at end of spool - if you are past half way on spool, try a fresh spool as a test. 5) curved angle feeding into feeder - put the filament on the floor -makes a MASSIVE difference. 6) UM2 only: Head too tight? Bizarrely MANY people loosen the 4 screws on the head by just a bit maybe 1/2 mm and suddenly they can print just fine! Has to do with pressure on the white teflon isolator. 6b) UM2 only: Bowden pushing too hard - for the same reason you don't want the bowden pushing too hard on the isolator. 6c) Um2 only: Spring pushing too hard. Although you want a gap you want as small as possible a gap between teflon isolator and steel isolator nut such that the spring is compressed as little as possible. 7) clogged nozzle - the number one problem of course - even if it seems clear. There can be build up on the inside of the nozzle that only burning with a flame can turn to ash and remove. Sometimes a grain of sand gets in there but that's more obvious (it just won't print). Atomic method (cold pull) helps but occasionally you need to remove the entire heater block/nozzle assembly and use flame. I found soaking with acetone does not help with caramelized pla. Even overnight. Maybe it works on ABS though. Simpler cold pull: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u07m3HTNyEg 😎 Temp Sensor bad - even the good ones vary by +/- 5C and bad ones can be any amount off - they usually read high and a working sensor can (rarely) fail high slowly over time. Meaning the sensor thinks you are at 220C but actually you are at 170C. At 170C the plastic is so viscous it can barely get out of the nozzle. You can verify your temp sensor using this simple video at youtube - on you tube search for this: mrZbX-SfftU 9) feeder spring issues - too tight, too loose. On the black UM2 feeder you want the tension such that you can clearly see the diamond pattern biting into the filament. You want to see at least 2 columns of diamonds. 4 columns is too much. On the white UM2 plus and UM3 feeders you usually want the tension set in the center. 10) Other feeder issues, one of the nuts holding UM2 and UM3 together often interferes with the feeder motor tilting it enough so that it still works but not very well. Other things that tilt the feeder motor, sleeve misaligned so it doesn't get a good grip. Gunk clogging the mechanism in there. 11) Filament diameter too big - 3mm is too much. 3mm filament is usually 2.85mm nominal or sometimes 2.9mm +/- .05. But some manufacturers (especially in china) make true 3.0mm filament with a tolerance of .1mm which is useless in an Ultimaker. It will print for a few meters and then clog so tight in the bowden you will have to remove the bowden from both ends to get the filament out. Throw that filament in the trash! It will save you weeks of pain 11b) Something wedged in with the filament. I was setting up 5 printers at once and ran filament change on all of them. One was slowly moving the filament through the tube and was almost to the head when I pushed the button and it sped up and ground the filament badly. I didn't think it was a problem and went ahead and printed something but there was a ground up spot followed by a flap of filament that got jammed in the bowden tube. Having the "plus" upgrade or using the IRobertI feeder helps you feel this with your hand by sliding the filament through the bowden a bit to see if it is stuck. 12) Hot weather. If air is above 30C or even possibly 25C, the air temperature combined with the extruder temperature can soften the filament inside the feeder such that it is getting squeezed flat as it passes through the feeder - this is obvious as you can see the problem in the bowden. The fix is to add a desk fan blowing on the back of the printer. Not an issue on the UM3 or UM2 "plus" series. 13) Crimped bowden. At least one person had an issue where the bowden was crimped a bit too much at the feeder end although the printer worked fine when new it eventually got worse and had underextrusion on random layers. it's easy to pull the bowden out of the feeder end and examine it. 14) Worn Bowden. After a lot of printing (or a little printing with abrasive filaments) the bowden resistance can be significant. It's easy to test by removing it completely from the machine and inserting some filament through it while one person holds it in the U shape. Preferably i nsert filament that has the pattern from the feeder. 15) Small nozzle. Rumor has it some of the .4mm nozzles are closer to .35mm. Not sure if this is actually true. I'm a bit skeptical but try a .6mm nozzle maybe. 16) CF filament. The knurled sleeve in the extruder can get ground down smooth - particularly from carbon fill. 4 spools of CF will destroy not just nozzles but the knurled sleeve also. Look at it visually where the filament touches the "pyramids". Make sure the pyramids are sharp. 17) Hot feeder driver. I've seen a more recent problem in the forums (>=2015) where people's stepper drivers get too hot - this is mostly a problem with the Z axis but also with the feeder. The high temps means the driver appears to shut down for a well under a second - maybe there is a temp sensor built into the driver chip? The solution from Ultimaker is that they lowered all the currents to their stepper drivers in the newer firmware. Another solution is to remove the cover and use desk fan to get a tiny bit of air movement under there. TinkerMarlin lets you set the currents from the menu system or you can send a gcode to lower the current. Ultimaker lowered the default currents in July of 2015 from 1300ma to 1200ma for X,Y,Z but left extruder at 1250. Other people (I think the support team of a major reseller but I forget) recommend X,Y,Z go down to 1000mA. M907 E1250 Above sets the extruder max current to the default - 1250mA. So try 900mA. This will only change until next power cycle so if you like your new value and want to save it use M500. You can just put these into an otherwise empty gcode file and "print" this and it will change. Or get tinkergnome marlin! You will wonder how you lived without it: https://github.com/TinkerGnome/Ultimaker2Marlin/releases M907 E900 M500 18) third fan broken. This tends to cause complete non-extrusion part way through a print. In the rear of the head for UM2 and the front of the head for UM3. Without this fan several things can go wrong. It can take a while as usually you also need several retractions to carry the heat upwards. There are a few failure mechanisms and I don't understand them all. One of them is probably that the molten PLA spreads out above the teflon and sticks to the metal in a core or fills the gap at the base of the bowden in UM2. Later it cools enough to keep the filament from moving up or down. 19) Spiralize/vase mode. This is a rarely used feature of Cura but you might have left it on by accident? In this mode the wall of your part is printed in a single pass. So if you have a .4mm nozzle and the wall is .8mm thick it will try to over extrude by 2X. This is difficult to do and may instead lead to underextrusion. 20) non-standard or bent fan shroud. Sometimes people print some fan shroud off of thingiverse or youmagine out of PLA or ABS. Some of these are great but most of them are crap. One needs to do good air flow modeling. Also if it's PLA it will slump and direct air differently. Air directed at the block or nozzle can cause severe underextrusion and also sometimes HEATER ERROR. Put the original shroud back on or just turn off the fan to prove that the fan is the problem. 21) Firmware settings - for example UM2+ firmware on UM2 or vice versa will cause 2X over extrusion or 2X underextrusion. Downgrading or changing firmware can mess up steps/mm and other settings - so if you updated firmware and then problems started then do a "reset to factory settigns" which corrects all the steps/mm values. 22) too many retractions (this causes complete failure) - if you have too many retractions on the same piece of filament you can grind it to dust. 10 is usually safe. 20 is in the danger zone. 50 should guarantee failure. You can tell cura to limit retractions to 10 per a given spot of filament. Do this by setting "maximum retration count" to 10 and "minimum extrusion distance" to your retraction distance (4.5mm for UM2 and 6.5 for UM3 and 8mm for S5). 23) Brittle filament. Espciallty with older PLA but even brand new pla can do this. If you unspool some (for example if it's in the bowden) for many hours (e.g. 10 hours) it can get extremely brittle and it can snap off into multiple pieces in the bowden. It's not obvious if you don't look for this. Then it starts printing just fine and at some point one of those pieces reaches the print head and gets hung up somewhere and the printer suddenly stops extruding for now apparent reason. This usually happens within the first meter of filament - once you get to printing the filament that was recently on the spool it should be fine from then on. 24) The "plus" feeder can have an issue where the filament doesn't sit properly for one print and it permanently damages the arm inside the feeder as shown by this photo - the hole is ground down asymetrically: http://gr5.org/plus_feeder_issue.jpg 25) Other feeder issues. You can test the feeder by putting the filament only part way down the bowden and with the feeder electrically turned on (or moving) pull very hard on the filament until it slips. You should be able to pull with about 5kg or 10 pounds of force before it slips. 4kg is acceptable. 2kg is a problem. If the stepper motor isn't engaged you can try going into the move menu. After a minute or so power is removed again from the feeder stepper.

FYI it's harder to get a copy of cura 15.X these days so I'm hosting it here (sorry, I only have the windows version): Cura 15.04.06 for windows It doesn't have nearly as many features as the latest cura and doesn't support UM3 or newer printers and it supports dual color printers but not second-extruder-support. But it works very well for 90% of printers out there and in some cases produces better prints (not sure why). I usually use the latest Cura but occasionally still use this old version when printing on my um2go printers.

FYI it's harder to get a copy of cura 15.X these days so I'm hosting it here: Cura 15.04.06 for windows

You can use a screw extractor but it sounds like maybe ABS got into the threads and hardened up over many hours (or hundreds of hours) of printing and it's locked in there permanently. I have one if you want to come by my house to try it out. We live near each other I think. I'll DM you. I sell Olsson blocks.

Did you see Burtoogle's reply? He's much more knowledgeable about this kind of thing.

It's caused by a feature called "combing". You want combing off for this part. It's combing the long way around. The combing feature used to be a bit smarter about going the shorter way around. In fact I thought this bug was only in cura 3.X. Not Cura 4.X.

You can also do the sendgcode as a single line command from a good ssh client. Something like: ssh root@1.2.3.4 su ultimaker /usr/share/griffin/python3 command_util.py < echo "sendgcode M142 R255 G255 B255 W0"

So you got it to work with sendgcode, maybe it will work now by inserting the gcode into a print job - just put it well past the comments as neotko explained in one of the links above I posted. Maybe M142 works fine in gcode as long as you are in developer mode?

This is a common problem and trivial to fix. It usually happens when someone picks up the printer and they squeeze a long belt too hard and it skips a tooth. Push the print head to the center of each of the 4 sides and pay attention to the side blocks and see if they stop at the same point or if one can keep moving. Also look straight down on the two rods that pass through the head and see if they visually don't look quite square. If either of these are true then it's easy to fix. Here is one description of how to fix it: https://ultimaker.com/en/resources/19953-aligning-the-axles

I think I heard a rumor they were going to turn off the feature in some version of the firmware. I'd try it with sendgcode and if it doesn't work there then the feature is probably disabled. Sorry. Or possibly you need to be in developer mode for M142 to work. Watch the video.