gr5

I definitely would stay away from cura version 2.X. It was unpleasant to work with. Cura 15.X is so much easier and less buggy. I think the latest cura probably has an anet style printer? maybe? I don't know. In cura 15.X go to machine settings and select reprap style printer. But you probably/might need to add some custom gcodes for the anet. Anet should have instructions or should have a version of cura 15.X somewhere modified and ready to go, right? I just know it's a kind of prusa i3/reprap style printer.

OH! You should have said that in the first place, lol. Instead of the 5th post. Yeah. As I said and as yellowshark said: Move the nozzle closer to the print bed. You aren't squishing the bottom layer enough. I don't know what kind of printer you have. On all Ultimaker printers you simply rotate the 3 leveling screws CCW as seen from below to move the glass bed up a bit. Do you have a printer with a heated bed? If you *do* have a heated bed 60C is good. I don't think you need PVA glue on build tak - I think that might defeat the purpose a bit but your main problem is not enough "squish". MUCH more details here:

I don't know this model of printer but it sounds like a reprap style Marlin firmware printer with SD card. Which is extremely common and a good design. So the overall basic steps are: 1) Output STL file from CAD 2) Have cura turn it from STL into gcode. 3) copy the gcode to an SD card and put in the printer. You can probably connect to your printer through USB also using pronterface on win xp. This is helpful in debugging the printer and calibrating things if it doesn't just work right away. For example debugging limit switches (maybe the motors go the wrong way or a limit switch is plugged into the wrong connector or a wire is broken). As far as Cura on win xp, you need to avoid the 64 bit versions of cura because I'm pretty sure win xp is 32 bit only. cura 15.X is fantastic so I'd go to the latest version of cura 15.X and see if that works on your win xp machine - I think it will. If it does then I'd stick with that slicer - it's a great slicer. DO NOT update your firmware using Cura unless it's a version of Marlin from Anet. You might want to get on an anet forum instead of the Ultimaker forum, lol. pronterface: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/ older cura: https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/list

Well isn't the circle attached to the build tak then? It should stay in place until the print is done. And then the circle should be attached to another one on the layer above, right? And so on going upwards eventually connecting to the rest of the part. Right? Again, a photo of what it looks like in cura would be helpful both solid view and layer view.

Cura takes an STL file as the input. Try to output an STL file from autodesk fusion 360. Then cura creates the gcode file as *output*. It can indeed read one in just to see (kind of) what the print will look like but it can't do anything other than display it. The *printer* takes the gcode file as input.

When you say "first layer" you mean "bottom layer", right? So they should stick to the glass, right? I guess I don't understand the question. If they aren't sticking to the glass your nozzle is too far from the glass. Maybe show a photo of what cura is doing.

Could you show a photo? It must be a strangely shaped vase to get stringing. In general I get zero stringing. Zero. I print slow and cool. On UM3 usually 30 or 40mm/sec on outer layer.

Well I've printed 0.8mm nozzle with 18mm^3/s on a UM2 with a black feeder. That's about the limit. 0.8mm nozzle can handle a much higher throughput because the larger bore means less pressure needed to squirt out the plastic. Yes the titan feeder is excellent. Just as good as the UM2. Particularly the 1.75mm. e3d concentrate mostly on 1.75mm so their 1.75mm products are excellent. The 3mm products not so great. For example they have this all metal hot end (not sure if titan) that doesn't do well with PLA. You really need some teflon in there for PLA but I think only the 1.75mm version has teflon in it. Without the teflon you often get clogs/jams because the molten PLA sticks so well to the metal. Anyway, I've done MANY extrusion tests and the best one is to print a cube in cura with 100% infill and no walls. Ignore the bottom layer. Set print speed to 100mm/sec for convenience. Then you can adjust the speed in % and it will equal the speed in mm/sec. (or slice it at some other speed and simply do the math to calculate your actual speed). If you are doing 100% infill and you see gaps then you are underextruding. Print slow at first so you know what a perfect layer looks like then slowly increase until you see gaps - then slow it down until you don't. Keep note of temperature, speed, nozzle diameter, layer height. Change temperature and repeat the experiment on the next layer of the cube. Keep good notes. Go all the way down to 180C as that's the region where you get the best quality but are forced to print very slow. Repeat for other nozzle sizes.

Not really because the temperature wasn't mentioned, right? I just skimmed it. But 240C is not normally recommended. It's a bit below if he prints at 240C I think? And if he prints at the default temp of, (not sure but let's say) 210C, then he's printing too fast and should drop to 30mm/sec (almost half speed). It's actually all more complicated. It depends on the feeder and the quality you want. Overhangs and certain other details (corners) suffer a bit at higher temps and higher speeds. It depends on what your goals are. I have 6 printers and usually I'm not in a rush so I usually print at 25 or 30mm/sec. If I'm impatient and don't care about quality I can go as high as 100mm/sec and/or 0.4mm layers with 0.8mm nozzle. Basically the speeds I published in my table are achieved with about 5 pounds (about 2.5kg) of force and the UM2 black feeder can usually put out about 10 pounds (barely if you are lucky and the teflon part is brand new). The UMO easily puts out 10-12 pounds much more consistently and the UM2 "plus" feeder and the UM3 can put out I think probably about 15 pounds. Bondtech even higher. But the UM2 black feeder has the most trouble so I recommend speeds that can handle about 5 pounds typical force. Your printer might have no trouble with 10 pounds and so you can print double the speeds I posted.

OH SNAP!!!!!!!!!!!1 Okay. Well that changes everything of course. It really looked like ABS. I changed the title of this topic. Well you have bad layer adhesion. You should enclose the machine and heat the air to 35C. Or raise the nozzle temp. ABS has a *very* narrow range of printing temps because if you are too cold you don't get good layer adhesion and if you go to hot the ABS cooks into a kind of gummy gunk that causes a semi-permanent clog in the nozzle. You can remove it by heating the nozzle over fire and removing with a toothpick. Particularly this will happen if you leave the nozzle hot for a few minutes but don't print. Increaseing by 5C can cause the problem. The last time I got an ABS nozzle clog I was printing at 255C. I usually print at 254C now, lol. But if I stop printing and keep the nozzle hot for a few minutes I'm sure even at 254C I'll get a clog. Your mileage may vary. Different printers are a few C different. Another solution is to print thicker layers. If you print 0.2mm layers versus what looks like 0.06mm layers the added mass of plastic pressing against the lower layer is more successful at heating the lower layer up. Really the best solution is to use ANYTHING but ABS. PLA prints the most beautiful. For things that need higher temps you could try nGen or PET. Those are in-between in difficulty. Here is a chart of suggestions - scroll to the second chart - the ones in green can't handle high temps as much. Yellow filaments are a good compromise - higher temp - but still easy to print. http://gr5.org/mat/

Oops. So not so easy to do in my head I suppose. I corrected it. Now instead of "far above" the recommended speed the user is only a little above my recommended speed unless they raise the temp to 240C. But of course, the quality of print will go down if they go that hot.

I've seen these cracks on ABS but NEVER on PLA. Are you sure this is PLA? Is it some "high temp" PLA? Try this experiment: boil some water in a tea cup. put some filament in and a thermometer. Find out what temperature the PLA goes soft and what temperature it goes hard. It should be around 52C for PLA. Around 99C for ABS. You may have some new formulation of PLA that goes soft at 80C or maybe it's mislabelled. The reason ABS cracks: Two reasons - one is bad layer bonding but this is in combination with much more shrinkage from the softening temp down to air temp. Basically both reasons that ABS cracks easily while you are still printing are the same reason - high softening temp and high melt temp. It's possible you have too powerful a fan and the air temp is too cold (20C) such that the layers are cooling too much (seems impossible with PLA but maybe it's possible with a really powerful fan) such that your layer bonding is bad combined with shrinkage causes it to crack. This seems so unlikely with PLA. I suppose if you printed with very strong fan *and* air temp was at 0C (freezing temp) you might be able to get PLA to crack like that.

Yes. The Olsson block. I sell them in USA at thegr5store.com. I also sell a slightly better version called the "block v3" which has less heat loss to air and better heat conduction to the nozzle. But you should be fine. Just always change the nozzle when it's at least 130C. I usually change the nozzle at 150C to 180C. And you can ignore the plastic in the thread. Also I recommend you use a torque wrench at around 0.5 to 1.0nM. This one works great: https://www.youmagine.com/designs/nozzle-torque-wrench

And prints would take 3X as long?

A:MeltInk B:PLA C:2.85 D 1300g E:51.5 F:~95 G:204 H:300g I:72 J:72

I agree with the above 2 posters. Some of your parts fell over. You need them to stick better. For one thing it looks like you put too much glue down if you want parts to stick well - wipe that with a wet tissue to remove most of it and to spread it around thinner. I show how to do this (and 2 other methods) in this video. Plus I show how to level like a boss as if your parts tend to fall over you need to squish the bottom layer more:

You can spray on a tissue and wipe on the bed. Or you can remove the glass, spray, insert the glass. I don't like getting the spray on the z screw.

You need to cover the front and top of the printer. It's really important to stay above the glass temp for ABS on the bottom 1mm or so. Glass temp is about 99C for most ABS. And lower the fan to 30%. This will give you an added benefit that the air temp will rise to about 35C (in addition to keeping the bed above 105C). For now you can just use saran wrap or a clear plastic bag to cover the front and for the top use one of those boxes that used to hold many reams of paper. They fit the top of a UM2 or UM3 perfectly with no tape or anything needed and they leave room at the back for the bowden. Eventually, if you print a lot of high temp materials like nylon (abs sucks - i'd stay away) you should get a front door/cover. Oh - and the 35C air temp is important also because if you don't do that you will likely get bad layer bonding (newer layers of ABS won't fully melt the layer below). Bad layer bonding isn't always obvious until you break it and notice it splits along layer lines. plastic should NEVER split along layer lines - they should be just as strong in all directions (no "grain").

If the cracks go all the way around then it's most likely Z axis errors. The Z axis probably sometimes moves not far enough - and then other times it moves too far. When it moves not far enough you get over extrusion and the layer sticks out a bit. When it moves too far you get underextrusion exactly like these cracks. Usually cleaning the screw very well will fix this issue. Note that most Z screws are double, triple or even quad helixes so make sure you clean out them all very well.

@geert_2 Actually, Illuminarti has done this test at multiple temperatures and speeds through a 0.4mm nozzle and he weighted the resulting "spaghetti" and this is what he discovered: The important graph: https://public.tableau.com/profile/illuminarti#!/vizhome/ExtrusionRates/Sheet1 And the rest of the article: http://www.extrudable.me/2013/04/18/exploring-extrusion-variability-and-limits/

@Fulv - keep in mind it might not meet your requirements. For example, it might not be able to print PLA. or it might cost a million euros. But it does appear to be a dual filament printer like the Ultimaker 3.

Right. Got it now. A third way to calibrate extrusion is print some "spaghetti" and then weight it. e.g. print 100mm of filament and weight it. Versus cutting 100mm of raw filament and weighing that also. Note that most extruders tend to slip about 10% so "normal" printing should underextrude by 10%. That seems just wrong to me but that's the way it is. It's not that the extruder motor is slipping - it's that there is enough pressure on the filament that the diamond shaped holes in the filament are positioned closer together than the diamonds on the feeder. Because the filament is slipping or compressing or something. By typically 10%.

If your "line width" is 0.6mm and your wall is 1.2mm it will do two passes next to each other and extrude the exact correct amount to make a 1.2mm wall. No flow calibration necessary. The best way to calibrate your extruder is to extrude 100mm with no load and make sure the filament really moves that far. If you have a bowden printer like an utimaker then start with the filament half way down the tube so there is no load. If your extruder is only a few mm from the hot end then extrude very very slowly. Or take the hot end apart so the filament isn't slowed by the hot end (maybe remove the nozzle?). You can use the feature "print thin walls". I use this all the time and it works pretty well but you might get some underextrusion right after. This will allow you to go down to a wall width about the same as line width. I think you can print a 0.6mm wall with a 0.6mm line width but barely. If you really need to print 0.6mm wall with 0.6mm nozzle then I recommend you enable "print thin walls" and set the line width to around 0.5mm or 0.55mm. This works quite well. I did this exact thing recently. It will extrude 0.5mm the first pass on the wall and on the second pass it will extrude only enough for the remaining .1mm (and move the nozzle just .1mm over to the side). This works great except when it starts extruding a non-wall it will underextrude for a short period of time while it builds pressure back up.

Try setting "fill gaps between walls" to "everywhere"