gr5

@sadsilly - if you are only printing PLA then I don't think you should worry about particulates. The type and composition of particulates from PLA are similar to those you get frying french fries - so you are probably breathing a higher concentration of mostly the same particulates if you eat at a restaurant that serves fries. Or if you cook in a wok or fry up pretty much anything - you are getting similar particulates in the air. However if you plan to print ABS you might (might!) want to invest in some filters. If you have a printer farm with 10 or more printers printing ABS I would definitely figure out a way to filter or exhaust the air. But breathing air in a room where a printer is printing with PLA is probably much better for your lungs/heatlh than being in a kitchen where someone is frying bacon. Note that PLA is made with corn oil.

Mine works well also. @migo - make sure spring is compressed to about 10mm when filament is loaded. If not try tightening the screw some more.

@V3DPrinting - I'll contact 3dsolex for you - I'm not sure what's going on here but I'm sure Carl aka @swordriff will send you a free replacement if you want. Who did you buy yours from? This test with no nozzle was with the block at 200C? You kind of have to do the no-nozzle test above 180C because you can get a cylinder of pla in the heat break after a print is over but this warms up and comes loose when you start a new print.

@tonydg - if it won't retract after a print this is a known issue and you should send it back. It looks like you are in USA. Send an email to thegr5store@gmail.com and I can ship you a new one with a return mailer. It doesn't matter if you bought the original from me or some other reseller - I can send you a new one. It takes me just 2 minutes to fix it.

@yellowshark makes a good point. We need a better definition of what seems unexpected. If your cylinder is not round that is definitely a problem and kind of common - it implies your axis are not square. This should not happen but may be easy to fix. Anyway I guess you need to show us some photos of what you are talkinga bout.

wow! love this!

PLA sticks to almost everything when it is melted. Particularly to metals like brass and steel. Even when you polish the metal carefully, it becomes a problem. All metal hot ends like the e3dv6 hotend works very poorly with PLA and it gets jammed all the time but it works great for ABS. Teflon (aka PTFE) is great because PLA doesn't stick much to teflon. Doesn't stick at all really. But teflon doesn't do well above 200C - it degrades "quickly" (over many hundreds of hours - maybe 500 hours failure if teflon reaches 250C). When teflon degrades it becomes more soft and more rubbery. The peek helps hold the teflon and also insulates the teflon so the teflon doesn't get too hot. Only a small part of the teflon gets hot - that small area at the bottom. If that area becomes week it is okay as the peek holds the teflon firmly without degrading. You could instead maybe use wood. You want a material that can withstand 250C for months. And is stiff and strong (as strong as any typical plastic like PLA, ABS but at 250C). But most important (and difficult to find) it needs to be somewhat insulative. It must not conduct heat very well.

This would be a good upgrade but you have to print your own mount.

You don't show the part where you actually apply the force, do you? I didn't see that part. I would love to see roughly how hard you are pushing.

The profile files are overwhelming in cura 3.X. For UM3 0.4 nozzle alone there are about 80 files. (3 or 4 resolutions X 10 or so materials, compatibility profiles, settings profiles, material profiles) It's a bit of a mess. Creating these is a pain in the neck reserved for someone paid to do so. Creating a SINGLE profile for one nozzle combination and single material combination and single printer (say 0.4 pla, 0.4 pva mark 2, 0.1 layer, slow speeds) is one thing but then immediately someone else will want one for 0.6mm pla and 0.4mm pva (less pva wastage) or for faster lower rez or for higher resolution. Suddenly it's 20 profiles just for pla/pva and another 20 for pla/pla. This is a great project for someone to do but it seems like a lot of work. I wish one could put everything into a single profile - maybe python formulas or case statements to calculate things like temperature and you could have sliding scales for nozzles (layer height = nozle height /3 maybe). Temperature could also be a formula. But this is not a feature of the profiles as you have to have a separate profile file for each mode (quality and nozzle and material).

They shouldn't be visible at all (sometimes this is called "the z seam" even though it's probably not Z movement that causes it but just that's where the outer shell starts and ends). You could try printing a bit slower and cooler (play with this in tune settings - try 50% and 25% print speeds for a few layers just to see what happens and 10C and 20C cooler just to see what happens for a few layers). This line might be caused by speed changes. Make all the speeds visible and make sure all the shell speeds are the same. The transition speed from inner shell to outer shell might be causing this. Do you have at least 2 shells? (maybe they call it wall now and not shell in cura).

Nice. maybe you can bring this print (or a similar small print) to the Netherlands to show everyone as we tour though Ultimaker together (yes, kman and I will be in Netherlands in a few weeks).

In the right photo it looks like horizontal expansion is set to 3mm (the default for PVA profiles) and on the left it looks like it is set to zero. Note that this is a crucial feature for PVA as PVA doesn't print on top of PLA so well so you want PVA "all the way down" to the build plate in one continuous path.

Initially I think it shows you a gif "video" summary - you have to click the tiny play triangle to get audio - AND you have to crank up the volume on your speakers.

The only sound I notice that sounds like "clicking" is a sound I am very familiar with - it's the sound of the head passing quickly over infill pattern and the clicking is coming from the infill as the metal head "clicks" past all those interior walls.

I'm guessing most of the variation is within 1cm of the build plate (aka bed)? The bottom layer is very hard to get the same diameter as the layer above because of how hard you are squishing the bottom layer. And if you increase the distance between the bed and the nozzle in your leveling then the part doesn't stick as well. So this is the hardest layer to be the same as the layers above but it can be done by using a negative value for "horizontal expansion first layer". The next few layers above tend to move inward for a few layers maybe 3mm, and then they move outward again, and then by 10mm from the build plate you should see extreme consistency. This bowing in is related to the temperature of the build plate. So now you have more compromises: You can lower the build plate temperature to say 40C, but now large parts are more likely to warp up at the corners and come off the bed. For small parts if you need perfect cylinders (say under 3cm in diameter) then this might be the way to go (40C bed). But for larger parts - more than 80mm across you need to keep the bed above the softening temp (about 52C for pla). In addition to all this, note that as PLA comes out of the nozzle it cools rapidly (in milliseconds) and PLA sticks to itself (which makes the prints better than for other materials) while still liquid so all corners and circles on a given layer (all circles drawn as circles by the X/Y movements in a given layer) are going to pull inward as the stretchy-liquid-rubber-band like material is pulled inward. I usually compensate this by, for example, making all my vertical holes about .3mm larger than the goal diameter. In summary - the variations you are seeing are probably caused by the material and the temperature and the movement more than the machine itself which is consistent to much better than .3mm - probably about 10X better than that (.03mm). A photo might help though. We may be talking about different things here.

You are indeed asking the next logical question but first make sure the M25 even makes a difference for you. If it does we can ask them to fix cura 3.X and insert the M25 at the end for UM2 printer profiles. If not there's no point in bugging the cura team. Also note that there are other work arounds - you can print UM2 in reprap mode (instead of ultigcode) and then you get to control the start/stop gcodes and can add a M25. But first see if this even works.

By the way - this is a challenging print - needs lots of support - lots of overhangs.

The part is low poly (lowish). It is what it is. The bottom image looks smoother probably because they used some "smoothing" feature built into openGL which is the library that displays these polygons in 3D. Both obj files and STL files define vertexes and triangles. They don't support the description of curved surfaces. So it's just a matter of how high a resolution (how many triangles) you want - the higher the qty of triangles the smoother the surface gets. At some point you are smoother than the curvature of the nozzle and there's no point and increasing triangles. You could ask the original designer if they have a higher polygon version of the model. I suspect when you print it you won't see the polygons anyway. For the most part.

This assembly in the photo above looks okay. I can't tell if the brass tube is all the way in but this is how it should look. It looks right but there still may be a leak. I can't tell where your leak was. There are 4 places to leak in this photo: 1) above peek (unlikely) 2) above brass pipe 3) above block 4) above nozzle (below block) If you have trouble taking this apart, you must heat to 120C first. Put a drop of water on the aluminum, and heat this in a flame (without burning the peek!!!) until the water boils completely away and heat for a little longer then any parts that were stuck will now rotate. NOTE A: It's super critical to put the nozzle in first, then put the brass pipe in SECOND. This way you stop all leaks. Do this while the aluminum is above 100C (any temperature from 100C to 200C is fine so just boil water on the aluminum). If you do "note a" you will eliminate leaks at #3 and #4. Full instructions start on page 45 here: https://ultimaker.com/download/272/Ultimaker Original+ Assembly Instructions v2.pdf

Click on your part, then click on the move button - in the top left corner - second icon down. What is the Z value? Make sure it is zero. If it's not zero set it to zero. How many bottom layers does it look like it will print in layer view? Only one? Or more? I'm not sure why you can't see the bottom layer when you scroll up a bit but he layer view has 2 controls - basically it shows a range of layers. If you slide up on the bottom of the range it hides the bottom layers in layer view. What version of cura is this exactly?

I wouldn't mess with the default retraction distance (4.5 on um2, 6.5 on um3) as that is basically perfect. You want it to completely remove all pressure within the bowden (have the filament resting on the bottom of the arc) but not actually lift any filament out of the nozzle. If you retract too much then the filament moves upwards and air goes into the nozzle. Then that bubble rises in the nozzle and heats and expands and overextrudes for several seconds (long after the retraction sequence is over). Then a little bit later the air is forced out and you get underextrusion as well. It's just a mess. So that explains exactly what I see. Make sure the bowden at both end is secure (doesn't move up and down by say 1mm on every retraction). If the bowden is secure then the default retractions are as good as it gets. If the bowden wiggles up and down by 1mm then either fix that or increase retraction by the exact same amount (1mm). Instead drop the temp to say 180C and the printing speeds all to 30mm/sec and you should see some great improvements in stringing.

And do a temperature test. It's extra easy to do on the UM3 - set the nozzles at the same temperature and use this technique here:

You want to drag on an STL file, yes. Some of them out there are bad/corrupt but 90% of the ones on thingiverse are printable. Maybe you got very unlucky and got a bad one. Did it show up at all visually when you dropped it into cura? Check it out in default view, then xray view, then slice view. Anything colored red in xray view is a problem with the model.

9mm/sec! Yikes!!! You should be able to do better than that! Maybe it's time to play with the temperature next? Try colder. Much colder. Like maybe 180C and start speeding it back up again. I have to say it's a bit annoying that everyone wants the UM3 because... well... "3 is better than 2". But in reality the UM2 has much higher acceleration and jerk values giving you better quality at higher speeds. The UM2go - the worst selling in the UM2 series - is the best printer of all of them due to it's extra stiff frame and extra short bowden.