gr5

Did you do the X/Y calibration step? That calibrates the distances between the heads. If you are off by quite a bit (e.g. .5mm) then there could be a gap between pva and pla but like Tom says it should be touching. If you still have a problem after above suggestions (they all sounds good - slow down, enable roof, calibrate x,y) then take a photo of a layer while it's printing. Like Tom says it should be touching.

Do you want those exact blocks? Or similar? Don't use the word "original" in your search as that's a new term from after most of these were designed. Look for the word "block" as in search thingiverse for "ultimaker sliding block". https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:45236 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:66866

Look into a product called "mosaic". They are out of canada. It only works on 1.75mm filament but you can get a 1.75mm conversion kit from 3dsolex as well. They do I think only up to 4 colors. If 2 colors are enough look into the "mark 2 upgrade".] Usually multicolor printing is done by printing separate parts and connecting them together later. This is true of most things I find in Walmart as well.

no cura 16.* https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/list

I strongly recommend octoprint. Not only does it cost only about 25 euros for a rasberry pi but it can handle the webcam in addition to everything else (preheat, print a job through a web page, monitor printer through a web page and so on). Octoprint does this through the USB so obviously you *can* do everything through the USB. I recommend you switch over from SD cards to octoprint web page. But to answer your question, you can ask the printer it's X,Y,Z,E location through one gcode and you can ask what it's goal temperatures and actual temperatures are through another gcode. You can keep sending these gcodes every few seconds. This should be enough information to decide if it's busy or not. It might be more likely that the printer will hang up/crash if you are doing all this during a print. Not sure.

Oh wait. You are in Norway. Are you in Oslo? If you want someone local I would start with Elias Bakken who created the "thing" printer and redeem and replicape. He knows a few people who could help you.

If you really want to hire someone smart in Netherlands who knows these printers very well I would contact @korneel

I don't think there is much of an advantage. Know that the heater area of the block will be warmer than where the temp sensor is. And the area closest to the temp sensor will be closest to the goal temperature. But the differences in temperature are not serious but I suppose they are large enough that every printer has it's own recommended print temperature for a given material (e.g. UM2 default PLA temp is I think 210C and UM3 is I think 200C). I don't recommend 2 heaters but if you did that they would most likely be in parallel. The 25W heater on UM3 core seems to be plenty even for the 0.8mm nozzle. I personally sell UM3 cores with 30W heaters which work fine and for UMO/UM2/UM2+ I sell heaters from 25W to 50W. Unless your fan shroud is touching the block, 35W seems to be more than enough for up to 2mm nozzles. When you go to higher wattage heaters you need to mess with (adjust) the PID values that control the heater.

Just take it apart. It will void the warranty but it's not that hard. It's very easy to break if you don't watch the below video but really it's not so hard: Rats - the link has an 8 followed by a D which turns into an emoticon and wrecks the link. Just search youtube for "um3 core disassembly" or paste the below link into your browser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln_tMz8Dwd0

Cura already has all these features. First of all if it's not retracting look at all the retraction settings. There's one called something like "minimum extrusion before retraction" and "minimum travel before retraction". Setting those both to zero will greatly increase how many retractions you are getting - possible to the point where you get filament grinding but that's another issues. Or in cura 2.* one of those is something like "maximum retractions on same filament". Set that to 20. Any more than 20 and you definitely will get grinding filament. Which version of cura is this? Also in cura 15.* and 2.* is "z hop on retraction" which is what you ask for but I strongly don't recommend it. It creates even more stringing. Also you can reduce speed and temperature to reduce stringing. Also there is an "avoid part distance" or something like that in cura 2.* which will avoid those towers if it's moving to another tower far away so it doesn't knock over an existing but I don't recommend this feature either. So I think everything you mentioned exists in cura already.

Did you see this? https://www.youmagine.com/designs/um2-spring-replacement

Read about gcodes. Those are what control the printer. You can convert a set of coordinates to gcodes trivially. For example: G28 X0 Y0 G28 Z0 The above you do first to home the x,y,z axes. Then G1 X10 Y10 Z110 <-- moves all 3 axis to position 10mm. G1 F600 <-- sets feedrate quite slow (movement speed for all axes combined) in mm/minute So 600 is 10mm/sec. You can go up to 300mm/sec and down to i-don't-know-what. Probably around 1mm/sec? Maybe slower. These gcodes work for (almost) any 3d printer out there. more here: http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code

@lexa1203 virus scanners make false positives all the time. This is normal. Blame the virus writers. hate them. If it weren't for virus writers we wouldn't need virus scanners.

Wow! On an Ultimaker! I don't remember if I've used ninjaflex on my bondtech yet. I'm surprised it would make much difference. Typically if I print as fast as that video (I print 10mm/sec for ninjaflex) it all bunches up in the bowden - like an S curve race track. More like a spiral actually. Like DNA. So I like to print very slow such that it doesn't bunch up. And hot (240C).

Bondtech is great but I don't think it will help you on ninjaflex. I assume it wasn't a bowden printer in the video? I have a bondtech on one of my printers and I'm pretty happy with it. Although the UM2+ feeder (the white feeder - not the black feeder) is easier to load and unload filament. bondtech is good at this but not as good as the "plus" feeder. But Bondtech has about twice the pushing strength. So it's great for really fast, low quality prints. But for ninjaflex not so much. It's like pushing on a string. You can push harder but that string isn't going to move any faster.

Try going to the folder: %localappdata% and %appdata% then going to the subfolder cura and deleting everything there. Then restart cura. No need to reinstall/uninstall cura.

Again, what printer do you have? Well you click in the upper right corner of cura where it has the name of your printer (e.g. "custom printer 1"). Then you can edit the machine settings in there (manage printers, select yours, printer settings). On one of the pages/tabs there is a checkbox for "origin at center". I'd be surprised if this is checked however. It should not be checked by default and if someone created a profile for your printer how could they have messed that part up? But if you created the profile yourself and checked that box then that might explain it. While in there look at all the machine settings to see if they match your printer. It might be something is way off such as the X,Y dimensions of your printer (or diameter if it is a delta printer).

The cores that come with the UM3 can print basically anything that any other printer can print as long as the temperature doesn't have to go above 280C for the nozzle. The difference between the BB core and the AA core is very subtle. The BB core has a little bit less locations inside for filament to get caught in an eddie and caramelize. The AA core supposedly doesn't drip as much. But the differences are very tiny and very subtle. They are really both really well designed cores. I'm sure either core type could print polysupport just fine. I do have a single 1.75mm hardcore if you want to try it out. It's not 1.75mm all the way back to the feeder so you would not be able to print say ninjaflex but contact me if you want to test it. I can sell it at a deep discount as it won't work with 3mm filament. thegr5store _at_ gmail.com

Cura lets you position the prime tower anywhere. would it help to move the prime tower to the front corner where your tool change happens? Or does it still move to the center of the print?

Well when you get your hardcore you can try the .8 nozzle and do .3mm or .4mm layer height. I just did a print with .3mm layer height and .8mm nozzle and I'm kind of amazed that the layers are not all that more noticable than .1mm layers. By the way when you use a .8mm profile I suggest you: 1) turn off retraction on layer change (that caused problems for me - major underextrusion on the wall near the back right corner where layer change happens by default) 2) Allow it to do two passes (default settings) even when wall width is .8m (although enough fiddling and setting wall line width to 1.0mm helped) 3) Increase all line widths to 0.8 ( I think default is .75) 4) Set infill speeds (actually all printing speeds) to be the same value. I had problems where the speed changes was ruining the infill 5) Consider .3mm layer height - prints faster and still nice looking. Also I found the new variable infill to be pretty amazing speed up for some of my parts but you have to play with it and look at the layer view carefully. But it saved another 10%. I was able to get my print which like yours are mechanical and functional and don't need to be pretty from 2 hours down to 30 minutes by fiddling with a lot of things. But it took 10 prints to finally get the right settings for my particular part.

Another option is to change the controller board on your printer. The UM (and most printers) still uses Marlin with 16 line look ahead but some of the newer controllers go out to 256 look ahead. For example redeem/replicape, smoothie board (not certain), and tinyg are all modern controllers with much more powerful computers yet still inexpensive (the wonder of cell phones).

I think reducing the triangle count is the most important take away here. If you are printing this for someone else then I would get them to re-export or ask them for step files or something (step files will have those holes as cylinders instead of multiple line segments/triangles). This part is very simple so an alternative is to model it in cad yourself. Drop it into cad as an stl and measure the diameters, lengths, curvatures and draw the same part next to it. Then export that with fewer triangles.

Um. Email sales _at_ 3dsolex.com to find out about if acetone will hurt ICE coating. I don't know. But it won't hurt non-ICE nozzles as I have used acetone before. I find it easier to heat a nozzle over a gas flame. I put a drop of water on it, then heat in flame and count how many seconds until water is boiled away (about 8) then wait the same amount of time additionally and then remove from heat and use paper towels and wooden toothpicks. sometimes I have a piece of filament handy as well to test the nozzle with. And a needle. Sometimes I just burn it to 500C or so and turn all that plastic to carbon. But yes you should be able to soak it for a few hours in acetone as well.

What printer? What version of cura? There is a setting in cura 15.X where you tell it if 0,0 is in the center of the printer or in the corner. If you tell cura it's in the center but in fact it is in the corner it will do what you describe.

MAJOR UNDEREXTRUSION feature in cura 2.7 beta. Maybe in Cura 2.*, I don't know. This is related to the above post. This took me all day to figure out. Here is a photo of the problem: There were sooo many false leads. I looked at it in gcode analyzer which showed me all kinds of unexpected things but eventually I realized it was the z seam. Wow - that is an intense z-seam! It turned out to be a long/slow retraction on layer change and the new layer starts out with the outermost shell (actually I think it does inner shell but this is a .8mm nozzle and I only wanted one shell). Now if you use the default profiles this isn't a problem. But if you use the default profiles it will print 20% slower because it will do two passes with .8mm nozzle for a .8mm wall (see my previous post above). So with default profiles the inner shell will be severly underextruded right after the layer change point but no one cares in that case as you can't see it and even at severe underextrusion it still supplies a some inner suport. It's only because I have to print over a hundred of these that I tried to tune my print faster than usual. And that is the whole point of the 0.8mm nozzle in my opinion - trying to get much faster prints. Granted this was already much faster without forcing outer shell to just one layer but I have no idea why "retract on layer change" is enabled in the 0.8 nozzle fast profile. In addition I have been playing with the gradual infill feature which also saved some significant time.