gr5

I thought I was being a decent person and am not sure what I did wrong. Was it this part? I was in a good mood and thought I was being funny. My jokes occasionally fall flat but when reading posts always assume the poster is smiling and friendly unless you see something clearly otherwise. Was it that? Or something else I said. I truly don't understand. Also I can type as fast as I can talk (very very fast) so I tend to type more than necessary.

Wow - Lances talking to each other. I don't know any good way to turn off top/bottom infill in one part of the print but turn it on in another, sorry. I guess I don't understand what the problem is. If you want the walls top be thinner you can just set the top/bottom thickness to be thinner - set it to one layer height and that might remove the infill you want to remove. But then maybe your walls are nice and thin but your top/bottom is too thin? I don't know exactly what the issue is. Are you just trying to speed up the print a little? There's other ways to speed up a print. Or is this extra thick walls causing a problem with quality somehow?

Oh - I just realized about that noise you mentioned. That was the Y stepper trying to move but seized. Got it now. I will remember this if it happens to anyone else. Ever (you are the first person who had this problem on the forums - I read pretty much every post).

>when I tried to turn the pulley clockwise it wouldn't move. Oh! Sorry I kept blaming the set screws. This is rare. I figured you would notice this when pushing the head around manually. But I often forget that "newbies" don't know it's okay to do that (I do it every day for various reasons). I've never heard of this before - there should be no moving parts in there other than the one obvious one. So this means some piece of metal or a screw or something was in there. I hope it stays out of the way from now on. Don't turn your printer upside-down! Maybe you should insist on a new Y stepper (they are like $5 wholesale/bulk). Point Matt out to this thread.

mark forged prints very very strong. They have a good process. But it's limited in 2 directions. Still it's pretty amazing. That's a very specialized printer.

I like Matt also. I have met him in person a few times. Tighten more. Do you have a hex screwdriver or an allen wrench? The printer should come with an L shaped allen wrench. You need to tighten the hell out of those Y axis set screws. The tool should be twisting slightly. You should have marks in your poor hurting fingers after.

I'm not a stepper expert. This is really not my expertise. I am an electrical engineer but specifications for these things is complex. I'm pretty sure any of those steppers would work. The 1.8 degrees is not critical (200 steps per rotation). You could do double or half that and all you really have to do is change the configuration.h file to setup the proper value for steps/mm. However if you have too many steps then you can't go as fast. With the current design the XY steppers can only go up to a little over 300mm/sec which is much faster than anyone would want to print at anyway. In other words arduino can put out up to exactly 40,000 steps per second and no faster. I wouldn't worry too much about voltage specs. Steppers are tough as hell. The current specification I would worry a bit - higher current implies more heating at the stepper driver and those can burn out. Although if you burn one out they are very cheap - around 10€ or $10 USD. But the steppers themselves should be fine. My steppers get very hot - sometimes around 70C, yet they work fine.

Did the SD card come with the printer? Can you reformat it? On some windows computers files may actually be: a.gcode.txt But when you look at it in windows it only shows: a.gcode Could it be that? The controller will only show gcode files. Also a very common problem is that one of the 2 cables to the ulticontroller is backwards or loose. Remove and re-insert both cables (with power off!). If one cable is not all the way you will get these symptoms: everything works except SD card.

Are you in the Boston area? I could fix this machine in seconds. I assume not. Oh well. Did you get this from printedSolid? If so you should just call them. This is easy stuff to fix. Anyway - whomever built your machine (in Memphis) didn't tighten the set screws enough. Their quality is pretty amazing normally so this is probably a one-off or rare event - still they probably would like to know about the serial number. Do you want to post the serial number here? @fbrc8-erin: someone at (I assume Memphis) didn't tighten this guys set screws enough. Anyway originally it was your X stepper that was slipping (the one in the rear right corner). I hope you tightened the hell out of the screws on the stepper and the pulley above the stepper. Now your problem is with the Y stepper. What happened is the head just mostly stopped moving in Y completely. This means the head is moving left and right but not up and down. You can see this clearly on the top of your cube - lines go left and right instead of diagonal. And it's putting down too much filament so it sometimes hits these bumps and makes noises and probably almost knocked the cube off the bed. Anyway then you aborted it and it homed X,Y,Z and the Y couldn't home so you got the limit switch error. The noise hopefully was just the set screw - it's possible you have a 3rd (minor) problem in that the X limit switch isn't getting hit - test this by pushing the head around and listening for the clicks when it hits the X and Y limit switches. Also note the friction while you are at it - the friction should be about the same for both. If the X limit switch isn't getting hit it's probably the fan shroud is bent or maybe you just need to bend the X limit switch out a mm more. Anyway I'm not even sure this is an issue. Back to your issue with the cube - the Y axis is now slipping - that's the one in the rear left corner - you need to tighten the hell out of all 6 (six) pulleys (actually 2 pulleys might be on the same screw but there are 5 or 6 set screws to tighten PER AXIS). Sorry it seems like your printer is a "dud" but you'll be fine. These printers are tough as hell. And you may be tempted to send it back and get a new one but it will be much less headache to just tighten the 6 screws.

I really need a diagram but if you are making say a geodesic dome then I would go for Nylon but as Krys says - it takes a while to learn how to do it right. For example you will need to enclose your printer, lower fan speed and do some weird stuff to get it to stick! Also you'll want to bake it before printing. Try taulman bridge - the easiest nylon I think maybe? Actually Taulman might have one even easier - I forget.

Like neo says - fans will improve overhangs. I doubt you can do too much fan for this but I don't know cheetah well. In other words fans may also cause other issues. Anyway by default Cura takes a while to crank the fans - I think around 5mm? There's so many versions of cura with so many defaults. Like neo says - you want fan at 100% by second or third layer (but no fan on bottom layer). For best quality never go over 30mm/sec. 60mm/sec will never ever be better quality than 30mm/sec. But it will be faster!

There's lots of tricks to change infill for different parts of your print. One trick is to put tiny cylinders inside your print - maybe 0.1mm in diameter in the area where you want solid infill. Cura will put walls around these tiny cylindrical holes and strengthen your print in that region. Another trick is to use S3D (not free - simplify 3d) which allows you to choose regions where you can see "this region should have 100% infill. Cura 2.X now allows this also - you split your part into multiple parts in CAD by cutting it up into 2 or more prints. Then load into Cura - do different infill for each part (icon on the left side) then merge them all back into one part again. I don't think it's explained in the manual yet. "merge" is one of the key words. I recommend the needles since you are publishing on thingiverse and since this will work with pretty much all slicers for all people. You might need ABS as GPUs can get hot!

You can get rid of it by selecting brim or skirt and setting lines and minimum skirt length to 0. But I don't recommend that. Skirt gets things going nicely so you get perfect printing. If you skip the skirt you will get an underextruded part of the bottom of the robot and it won't look as good. Also it might fall over (not stick as well). If you have a "blob" connecting to your skirt or print then grab the blob at the begining of the print with your fingers quickly and pull it away from the print before it starts the skirt.

Once you get the blob off - realize your leak is most likely through the threads at the top of the olsson block. The problem is that you don't have a spring - you have the aluminum spacer - and it's not tight enough. So while nozzle is hot (150C is good temp) rotate the round steel coupler one turn clockwise looking from above. You don't need to take anything apart to do this. It might be already all the way down in which case be careful you don't break it (maybe move it CCW a little first to feel the force - brass is soft and easy to destroy). Rotate by sticking a thin screwdriver like tool into the holes of the steel coupler. If it is already all the way down then instead tighten the 4 thumb screws a little more. Again - while nozzle is hot (120C to 180C).

Your post is a bit confusing to me so let me explain a few failure modes: 1) Z never ever goes up. Always down. 2) Z goes wrong direction. When you try to home it goes all the way down and makes bad noise. 3) Z moves wrong distance (usually half) so when you home it from the bottom it never reaches the top - if you home near the top it homes properly. When you print things they are half height. 4) Z works fine usually but sometimes bed falls suddenly for no apparent reason (this is normal - steppers turn off after a minute of no use). 5) Z moves one direction but refuses to move the other direction (limit switch problem). Is your problem one of 1-5 above? If not maybe a video will help as the words you wrote don't make complete sense in English (sorry!).

Trust neotko. He is 100% correct. It's one of the 6 X axis pulleys and almost surely one of the 2 on the short belt (motor or just above motor). You many need to remove the motor cover to get at the set screw - only 2 screws to remove the steel cover. Keep in mind that you can push the head around to align the set screw to your needs and you might be able to do it without removing anything. Tighten the hell out of these screws. The tool should twist slightly. You should be scared you will break something. It should hurt your fingers if you are using an L shaped tool. Use only the correct size metric allen wrench. I think 2mm.

Marlin does this. There is a setting called "jerk" which is not jerk but instead the max change in instantaneous velocity at a vertex. In other words take the vel vector before and after a vertex and subtract them. The magnitude of the difference vector is your speed change. That is kept to 20mm. So for 90 degrees the speed goes down to 14mm/sec. For sharper angles (say 180 degrees) that goes down to 10mm/sec). For very very slight angles the limiting vertex speed is quite high. Maybe as high as 1000mm/sec (which is faster than the max speed (300mm/sec) of the printer so it won't limit at all.

>Parts I printed had decent horizontal strength but vertical was awful, snapping easily. That's the "layer adhesion" problem that occurs with all higher TG filaments (basically everything besides PLA). The fix is usually to enclose the printer to heat the air up to at least 40C and reduce fan.

Why does the robot need a higher TG than PLA? PLA can go up to about 50C no problem. Will the robot be in temperatures that hot? Yikes! Well to reduce stringing usually lowering temperature helps. If you have to make an hour print every time you change the slightest thing you will take days to figure this out. Why not change settings while it's printing? For stringing test I recommend 2 towers a few cm apart. Make sure it takes at least 3 seconds to print each section of tower - so maybe 2cm diameter towers with 24% infill and 2 shells. Then you can play with speed and temperature and fan to figure out what stops stringing. Once you understand stringing you can try to get it to print overhangs better. For high TG materials it's always best to enclose the printer. The warmer the air inside the printer the more fan you will need. With no enclosure you want as little fan as possible - the minimum to get the fan to rotate. If you raise the air closer to glass temp you need more and more fan. Fan will help the overhangs greatly. So more fan implies better overhangs and better bridging. But more fan will hurt your layer adhesion (doesn't matter for PLA). So for example if you print a pencil shaped tower it will snap easily along layer lines if you have too much fan. So for fan experimentation try printing a 45 degree overhang and adjust fan ever 2mm (and mark the part with a marker). Make sure the part takes at least 5 seconds per layer so you aren't confusing hot underlayers with fan issues. Once you pick a good temperature that doesn't string too much (some stringing is fine) then pick your speed that doesn't underextrude - unfortunately to get all this to work you might end up with 10mm/sec. But hopefully you can get a reasonable speed like 30mm/sec to work with all these other parameters. If you find the speed has to be crazy slow to not underextrude your printer is probably faulty. Most likely the teflon coupler is soft and pinches the filament but it could be 15 different things that causes underextrusion. I post about underextrusion more than anything else so solutions are all over this forum.

There's a 6th topic somewhere even better than those 5. Quick answer: use oil. Print 240C and 10mm/sec. Oil is most important! This is ninjaflex:

Your Y axis is going to the wrong position. Posibly it is wired backwards (always moves the wrong way) or maybe it's not connected at all? Does you Y axis *ever* move? Maybe you should show it doing the homing procedure - just skip through the bed leveling procedure saying "continue" every time - you can always run it later, then tell it to home the head (x and y) and video this procedure. In fact before steppers are powered up, push the head to the center of the printer and then home it and video this and post. I'm guessing the head either doesn't move at all in Y or moves the wrong direction (I forget if it's supposed to home in the front or the back as UMO and UM2 are opposite and so both seem "right" to me as I have been using both lately - oh wait - UM2 should home in the back left corner).

If one of the 4 wires is broken you will get similar results so swap the Y stepper with another stepper just to make sure it's the board. If the problem is still with the board then you should just buy a whole new board. It could be many components - the driver itself or any of the capacitors or resistors nearby. Or a bad board etch (not likely).

Nice! Well comparing XTCF20 to their regular PLA/PHA product here: http://colorfabb.com/files/FKUR/TD_BIO-FLEX_V_135001_en.pdf It's about the same strength (e.g. tensile strength) (comparing XT and PLA) but much stiffer - twice as stiff. Usually this means it will shatter but this XTCF20 has a decent elongation at break so instead I would assume it would kind of have a small permanent dent if you dropped something made from this material onto a hard floor. Which is still better than shattering.

Excellent! Note that you won't get as beautiful overhangs at 240C but if you are in a rush and/or don't have any significant overhangs then stick with 240C. Personally I have several printers and usually not in a rush so I just print slower or use a larger nozzle.

Like I said. Although I haven't found anything technically *stronger*, if you increase flexibility a little bit (like nylon) it's amazingly difficult to break. But it's not stronger the way I would define stronger. Like it wouldn't be any better if you were building say a bridge. But it *would* be better (nylon again) if you drop it (won't shatter) or drive over it with a car (just deforms and snaps back). But if you want to use it for a quadcopter arm or a bridge or something structural that holds a lot of weight - PLA is just as good or better than most materials. Although in many cases I suppose Nylon is better. Really I need to know what you are using the material for before I would ever recommend going away from PLA.