gr5

I don't like support. I don't use it. usually I can rotate the model or add just a few supports in CAD. Cutting the model in half is great too.

It would be nice if you could put the photos on your computer instead of google or drop box, then in the post choose the second to the last icon: "image gallery" then upload tab then just drag and drop the images. This post may help other people for years to come yet you already moved your drop box photo - very rude to those poor people in the future. Whereas if you get the photos onto your hard drive it's easy to send them to ultimaker for "permanent" display. Anyway we really need a photo of the print next. Since you are new I would start out with .2mm layers instead of .06mm. This is just to get a feel for things but if you lay it on that thick you will also have to slow it down - try 35mm. Printing at 50mm/sec is too fast for .2mm layers but more importantly it lowers the quality which conflicts with the .06mm thing which implies you want higher quality. But none of this advice helps you with your current problem - picture please.

Also if you can drop infill to 24% I recommend it. Once you go above 25% I hate the pattern - it ends up printing each diagonal on every other layer and they layers don't touch the layer below well. PLA is strong as hell and this print with 24% infill you should be able to drive a car over it. Or at least stand on it. Also make sure your infill speed is set to 0 (and shell speed and all those other printing speeds). Printing infill at a higher speed is always asking for trouble (and feeder skips). One more thing - consider getting the um2+ upgrade when it comes out. This makes the feeder twice as powerful. It will fix your skip backs but not your grinding. I hear the new upgrade kit is not for faint of heart - it requires drilling into the back panel. Or print and build this adapter which is really cool and saves you money from buying the um2+ upgrade kit since you already have the olsson block and the robert feeder: https://www.youmagine.com/designs/belt-geared-um2-feeder-upgrade

You have two completely different issues and should think of them as different. One is that you grind filament causing failure. The other is "skip backs". I don't think the problems are related. The grinding issue is most likely either caused by too many retractions in your print (that interlocking print you showed appears to have very few) or bad tension on the feeder. (again - I've only had grinding due to too many retractions - like nonstop retractions - thousands - one very few seconds) So please confirm that you have few retractions and lets move onto tension. Probably not tight enough. How is the tension set? At the top is loosest, bottom is tightest, different springs require different tension. You want the pattern some where between the 2 patterns below - more like the right one than the left one. 4.5mm retraction should be about the right distance - this is factory default. If you watch a print with lots of retractions you should see the filament at the top of the arch stop pushing up on the tube and rest on the bottom - looking through the bowden at the top of the print head you should see no retraction there - just pressure relief. .5mm retraction is appropriate for a feeder mounted on the print head - not for an ultimaker. You can also get grinding because you are printing too fast and this can also cause skip backs so your issues might be related but I doubt it. If that's the issue then just change feedrate to 50% in the tune menu and see if that helps. Don't compare the temperatures of different printers by different companies. 210C on a Makerbot is not the same as 210C on an Ultimaker. I sell temp sensors - I test them in bunches of 10 or 20 at a time. I made a test aluminum block and heat it with a heater/sensor pair and with an ultimaker electronics to 260C. I then insert a temp sensor in an extra hole and check it's resistance. I can usually tell you if the sensor will read low or high just by how far it sticks out the hole and more importantly how tight it is in the hole. If tight in the hole (and if I have trouble getting out at the end) it typically reads 10C high. If loose, 10C low. If not all the way inserted, another 5C lower. I recommend you print at least at 220C as long as the quality doesn't go down. 230C or 240C is safer and likely you will have less kick-backs aka "skipping" of the feeder. Your print speed for .15mm layers is reasonable but too fast if you switch to .2mm layers. You are printing at the limit of the recommend speed for 210C. Which is half what the printer should be able to do without feeder skipping. If your temp sensor is off by 10C from my printer then going to 220C should help quite a bit. skipping on the bottom layer is different than all the other layers. It is much more common because if you level it .1mm low then you have .3mm vertical of filament squished into .2mm of space which is actually what I recommend to get the part to stick well. But it can cause feeder skipping. For that reason and because you are printing double volume (.3mm thick instead of .15mm layer height) you need to print the bottom layer much slower - 20mm/sec is about right. Also I recommend you go up to 1300ma for the feeder.

For vertical round holes they will ALWAYS be significantly smaller. Think of molten plastic as like stretchy snot. In the first few milliseconds it cools enough such that it is similar to a rubber band as it is being placed. It's this stretchiness caused by the initial cooling (while still liquid) that is the problem. As it rounds the circle forces are pulling inward. Not a problem for walls or other straight lines. Dimensional accuracy from wall to wall is excellent. For horizontal round holes you don't get this issue. This is a problem for ALL plastics. Even if you go the most common manufacturing technique - injection molding - there are all kinds of things you have to adjust in your cad model to get it to come out right - even corner angles in a box have to be tweaked in cad so they come out at 90 degrees when they come out of the mold. The best solution by far is to always make your vertical holes about .6mm larger (in diameter) than needed and to experiment a bit (print just 4 layers of the part and compare to the part that has to fit in the hole, then adjust the cad model).

@fredz - I'm glad you are looking at the prusa because it is also an open source machine. However I suspect you will find better quality parts from the UM2. You can order a part 3d printed through 3dhubs.com for very little money and you can have it printed by a prusa i3 and also by an Ultimaker. And you can probably have them printed in your town and you can go talk to the owners when you pick up your parts and see how much headaches they have had.

For solid-infill layers I would expect it to be at 30mm/sec which is slower than your other speeds. For the grid pattern it should be faster. There is an acceleration factor also. If you are printing long straight lines (say 100mm) it can get up to 80mm/sec but if you have short segments it might not be able to get up to speed.

Vertical holes are MUCH smaller than intended due to what avogra says - not because of what you might have thought. PLA only shrinks about .3% from glass temp to room temp. ABS .6%. That .6% makes it twice as hard to keep ABS from lifting off the bed as the part cools but has little to do with dimensional accuracies.

80mm/sec for infill and 50mm/sec for walls is a bad idea. It has only been the default for a year or so and often these new settings end up going back to the old settings after a year or two of complaints. I mean maybe 80/50 works fine on most printers as long as your layer height is thin enough. Most likely your printer can't extrude as fast as it used to be able to due to a very thin layer of gunk in your nozzle. You can burn that gunk out or soak it in acetone over night. Or your white teflon isolator may have softened after lots of printing and now squeezes the filament causing much resistance. Anyway what is your layer height? 80mm/sec is just too fast if you are at the default 210C and .2mm. You can go that fast at .1mm but barely. Here are my recommended top speeds for .2mm layers (twice as fast for .1mm layers): 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. If you hear the feeder stepper skip back (make that sound) then the pressure is too high. That happens around 10 pounds (5kg) of force which is rather extreme. You shouldn't need that kind of force but that would be completely expected at 80mm/sec .2mm layer height 210C nozzle temp.

I mostly stopped having issues with my printer when I got more than one because at that point I felt less rushed because I had a second (and third and fourth) printer I can fall back on if the first printer is busy. Now I usually print at 30mm/sec and 220C for PLA for either .1mm or .2mm layer height. This takes longer but there is less pressure in the print head and so failures are less common because there is plenty of margin for error.

The extruder system on the UMO used to grind filament a lot when you printed with too much pressure/force on the filament. The UM2 was designed to be able to control this filament such that the feeder would skip back rather than grind the filament. It skips so far back it can take a while before the filament starts coming out again. This "improvement" was really a tradeoff that isn't clear if it's better or worse. For a really rough print the skip backs aren't a disaster but it does indeed make the part weaker. Regarding the feeder current - you can only raise it a little bit. Default current on my older UM2 was 1250ma. 1300ma was stronger. 1350 started to get weaker again plus it got too hot and the filament can get above glass temp and start slipping/grinding. So I recommend you stick with 1250ma. It's not 100% clear to me if you get clogs or something else. Also check how brittle your filament is - you should be able to bend it 90 degrees with your fingers without it breaking. If not you might have to throw away all your old filament as brittle filament can break in the bowden and then get stuck in a few locations when it gets to the print head. Even though you don't think it's the ptfe coupler you can and should test it. Since you have the olsson block it's easy. First do a cold pull to get most of the filament out of the nozzle - then heat the nozzle to 160C (or hotter) and remove the nozzle while hot. Then let it cool down to below 50C and then take some fresh filament - preferable some that has been through the feeder with the pattern on it. Pull back any filament from the back of the printer so the bowden is mostly empty then feed a fresh piece up from the head to feel the resistance in the ptfe. The resistance can quickly go from 1 ounce of pressure to 3 pounds of pressure if the filament is curved so try the most curved piece you have. Consider also testing it as it goes through the top of the bowden arch. It's not clear to me if it stops printing for 20 seconds or completely fails a print. I can give you causes for each of these - not sure which problem happens more often for you.

Never use the search engine of any site. Always use google. You can't beat 100 brilliant programmers. So go to google and add this at the start of your search query: site:ultimaker.com now put your other search criterea here That will limit results to ultimaker.com website and 99% of the results will be from the forum. Don't just do this for ultimaker - do it for all website searches.

You will find the printer prints much nicer with the filament on the floor.

kkkturbo did you set the same 3 things? It's critical to make sure combing is on, and those two "minimum/minimal" settings are both at 0. This should assure retraction. The next issue is that you are probably printing too hot. The hotter the filament is, the more like honey it is and it leaks too much. You want it closer to toothpaste so you want it cool. Some filaments won't string at all at 210C. Some filaments need to go down to 160C to stop stringing (but the extruder will normall stop moving if the temp goes below 170C so 180C is the lowest practical temperature). But if you print that cold you also have to slow things down a lot. Slowing down also helps stringing because there is less pressure in the head when it goes to retract but mostly the problem with printing too fast at colder temps is that you get heavy underextrusion making the part ugly. I recommend printing at 200C and 0.1mm layers and 30mm/sec and if you still get stringing then try a different filament. Even the same brand but a different color will help. Usually white PLA is particularly bad at stringing.

zip isn't a cad format. It's a way of compressing one or more files. First unzip it. What format is the 3d object in? Cura only reads a few formats. most cad programs will export in stl format. Under options make sure you output in mm. Cura assumes dimensions are in mm so if you designed it in inches and you export it in mm your cad program should fix that automatically.

You can get most parts you need here and prices are quite good: http://shop.dim3nsions.ch/3dprinterparts/hotend.html Those parts are made by 3dsolex.com but 3dsolex prefers you use other resellers such as dimensions. or here: http://www.ideato3d.be/product-category/3dsolex-products/

lol. I made that in about 5 minutes from scrap and a single screw and a hole saw. Those pieces of wood came from the demolition of a bathroom and kitchen. Ugliest spool holder you'll ever see.

In xray view - all that red at the bottom - that's messing up the bottom layer. I think. Possibly turn on "fix horrible A" or "fix horrible B". Sometimes that fixes it. But really you should fix it in CAD - there are probably extra internal walls right where the bottom stops - on the inner edge. Really ANY red in xray view can cause problems but in your case it looks like that almost invisible red line that shows the line between where the bottom did print and where it was supposed to print.

Yes, use SD card. USB doesn't work so well - what usually happens is it suddenly stops for no apparent reason. The printing software, if it's cura, has a log file. You will probably see thousands of errors in there related to bad checksum on the usb - eventually it crashes. If you must use USB you will have to experiment - try a different USB cable, a different computer, or add a USB HUB which buffers the signal (makes the signal stronger).

I'm not sure if you still can in cura 15.04 - I think it's there somewhere. Cura is really your worst option. The least control over feedrate and temp and so on. Use pronterface: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/ Just copy in the files and run. No installation necessary.

Sometimes the printer is crooked - typically from shipping - such that the top 4 corners are not in a plane. Imagine putting the printer up on a corner and balancing it then pushing down hard. The simplest way to think of the result is that say of the outer 4 rods the X ones are perfect but the Y ones are no longer parallel - they are tilted up higher in opposite corners. This requires the glass to be "saddle shaped" to get a flat bottom layer. Or converseley one of the leveling screws sitcks up a bit but then the 4 clips pull down and the glass is bent to a saddle shape. Either of these problems makes it impossible to level perfectly (usually good enough) for large prints. If you have this saddle issue the best fix (done by several people on this forum) is to simple add a shim/spacer somewhere. Maybe a dime would work in one of the 4 corners. You have to map out the problem first though (get two opposite corners perfect while the other 2 corners either both low or both high).

I see the problem here -- your printer stopped. Oh wait you want to know why? Are you doing usb printing? If so look at the log file - usb printing is not recommended. Alternatively does your controller maybe crash?

lol. I used to have 4 springs - hated it. was always tipping in strange directions. Maybe there is some new UMO leveling procedure I don't know about? The only way I know to level is to tell it to home. It goes to Z=0. Then you make adjustments to either the Z switch or to the leveling screws. If you adjust the Z switch you have to then re-home. That procedure is always done at Z=0. Is there some other procedure for the UMO that levels at a different height such as Z=0.8mm?

Try it now that you are activated.

You want to transfer gcode files, not stl files. stl files need to be sliced - you have to specify how thick to make the slices, what nozzle size you have, things like that. After cura slices your stl file make sure you look at it in layer view - this is a crucial step as this is where you find all kinds of problems in seconds rather than hours of printing. Look at every layer even if only for 1/10 of a second - you can use shift-up arrow and shift+down arrow to scroll through the layers quickly. Then save to a gcode file and copy *that* file to the sd card. Good luck.