gr5

Glass is black in the near and far infrared. That's why you get dew on glass - the glass cools below air temp. If it was transparent you would get dew on the dashboard. If it was highly reflective you would get no dew at all (you don't get dew on a sheet of aluminum foil left out). It's true though that you want to aim the meter straight down. I did many IR tests on my bed recently and it's pretty damn accurate on glass. The edges are about 5C cooler than the center.

It's normal but it's more complicated - the PLA shrinks as it cools - within milliseconds it is already like a liquid rubber band. When you have convex overhangs like this each layer above tries to pull inward the layer below and you get a lip or a raised edge. There's tons of posts about this in other parts of the forum with really interesting slow motion macro photography and 2 possible solutions. The main fix is MORE FAN. Or just do less overhangs. Some day we'll have a printer with 2 heads that prints a soluable second filament for support. Some day.

bump.

I think it's underextruding. Wait - is that only the bottom layer that is separating or all layers? If only bottom layer then you need to raise the bed a little closer to nozzle - just rotate the 3 leveling screws - do not bother with the leveling procedure again. if that's happening on every layer then google "ultimaker underextrusion gr5" and look for a post where I list at least 5 potential causes. But slowing down print by 2X and raising temp by 10C is good advice.

Filament should NOT break in the bowden. There was a bad batch of UM filament recently where parts of it were brittle. Try a few different colors of PLA and bend the filament back and forth (the bit at the end of the spool). It should not snap easily. You can snap it if you bend it back and forth a few times though. anyway if it breaks too easily in the bowden then it's a disaster. Some of those pieces will get caught and the print will fail. So send that filament back if it is indeed brittle. Or if it's really old just throw it in the trash and get some new filament.

Either you are getting underextrusion (40 possible causes but filament tangle most likely) or more likely you have a Z issue where it drops down. You need to figure out if it's the Z or not. Have you noticed it drop suddenly? Best thing is print something 10mmX10mmx10mm and if you get one of those rows then good! measuer the height and if it's too tall by more than 0.5mm then that's good! you found the problem. Maybe print someting that looks like stairs with each step at 10mm,20mm,30mm - once it fails let it print one more step and measure the height. If it is indeed the Z you need to lower the Z current and/or cool the board more (the board under the printer). One easy way to lower Z current is to add this to your gcode: M907 Z1000 That sets Z max current to 1000mA. I think default is around 1300ma. You can just add that to your gcode file before you print it as a test.

Also if you use glue stick I recommend wetting a paper tissue and spreading the glue out very thin. when it dries it should be almost invisible. Try to get rid of all glue bumps and glue blobs.

There are 3 screws that attach the aluminum part of the bed to the steel base plate. The heads of these screws shoulld sit in holes that are "counter sunk". Sometimes UM doesn't countersink the holes enough such that the head sticks out of the hole slightly - this pushes the glass off the aluminum plate such that their is an air gap. This means the glass is MUCH cooler than the aluminum plate. This might be your problem. It's easy to countersink the holes with an inexpensive drill bit:

What material are you printing? I'm guessing ABS. Try using no fan at all. Set fan to 0% for the next part you print. also cover your machine enough such that the air temperature reaches 35C to 40C (but no hotter than 40C). These 2 things will help with your issue. If you are printing PLA then you probably have underextrusion - try printing a little hotter and slower. Please show a photo of what you are talking about as your description may seem very exacting but there are 2 completely different phenomenon that you could be describing.

What country are you in? In USA you can get a very nice infrared thermometer gun that measures the glass temp accurately for about $10. I know we are spoiled here in the USA with pricing and the rest of the world things cost more. Not sure why. There are so many things in your post I can help you with but no time right now... If you are printing ABS and you want to get really good at it you need to cover your machine anyway so put a box over the top with an opening in the back for the feeder and tape it on there to get the air up to 30C to 40C (no hotter than 40C as the steppers might get overheated) and cover the front with some plastic wrap or something. 100C should result in actual temp of about 105C on the center of the glass and 95C towards the edges. A drop of water will not boil furiously but it won't last very long either - less than a minute. it should indeed be too hot to keep your finger on there for 10 seconds but maybe not too hot to keep your finger on the glass for 1 full second. If your ABS prints are warping up off the bed there are many solutions that you need to do. first and foremost use the brim feature in Cura. Also bottom layer MUST be squished into the bed a bit - so maybe raise the bed slightly by turning the 3 leveling screws counter clockwise. Dont' re-level with the procedure - better to adjust adjust a little. And finally use some PVA glue. hairspray, wood glue, glue stick all have PVA glue in them - you want to water it down so it is so thin you can' t see it - that's why harispray works so well as it puts on the correct amount. Instead I use wood glue mixed with 10 parts water and paint it on with a paint brush and let dry. Also keep dust off your glass -- I typically need to clean my glass once per week with window cleaner.

Sometimes sketchup saves things in inches and STL's have no units and Cura expects everything in mm so I simply multiply by 25.4 and everything scales perfectly and accurately. The "errors" between sketchup and Cura should be an EXACT number like 10 or 25.4 (10 if sketchup exports in cm).

Remove bowden at both ends, try to pull it or push it out. Once I had to completely bring the bowden over to pan with boiling water but hopefully it isn't that bad. Is your filament so brittle that it is cracking in the bowden by any chance? If so it's a bad batch. Otherwise there are tons of reasons for getting lots of jams. Let me know about cracking first though.

The nose of the dolphin is the easiest to fix. Best way to fix this is to print a tower next to the dolphin so the tip of the dolphin can cool - the way it is now the nose never cools as the nozzle is constantly touching it. The supports look like they moved - they need to be thicker - maybe 8mm? At least the bottom half of the supports need to be thicker so they don't wobble around like grass in the wind.

This machine is meant to come apart easily. But that crunching sound is probably normal - those are the ball bearings in the 2 vertical linear bearings for those 2 8mm rods. Did you actually see it fall? This is actually common but also common is underextrusion for a layer or 3 due to a tangle. Anyway you are probably right. It's usually related to some recent boards that are more susceptible to overheating I think maybe due to too much current to the Z axis. There are 2 solutions out on the forums - sometimes you have to do both solutions. One solution is to remove the bottom cover and tilt the machine a bit and put a fan - like a window fan - blowing on the circuit board. You can print sideways or even upside-down - it doesn't affect the print. The other fix is to lower the Z current with a gcode - add it into your existing gcode file - it only changes current temprarily until you power cycle (or maybe the next print? I think power cycle): M907 Z1000 sets to 1000ma max - I think the default might be 1300ma.

I get the emails just fine.

I haven't looked at my UMO aluminum block in a long time - I didn't realize the hole went all the way through. For the UM2 it doesn't go through so I had to drill from the back (the olsson block has a small hole already to push probes out with). Well I guess you should remove the whole assembly, put it in a vice and push much harder.

I think the other guy kind of flexed the tube - straight, then relaxed into U shape, repeat 2 times. This may have straightened any kinks (not sure why the filament was stuck - it looked okay - didn't even know which end was stuck).

I cleaned out a bowden with filament stuck in it only yesterday. I poured boiling water into a large pyrex brownie pan but that wasn't hot enough so I reboiled the water now that the glass was hot and poured it in again - water temp was 81C according to IR temp sensor. Left bowden underwater (used 4 forks to hold it under and 2 people) for about an entire minute. pulled it out of the water using only hands, straightened the tube completely straight and kind of pulled it straight, then after about 15 seconds of cooling tried and was able to push out the "bad" PLA with a piece of fresh, cold filament. It slid out easily.

Most of my printers I always have flow at 100% but I had one printer for a month that absolutely needed higher flow. Never figured out why (yes I checked steps/mm).

You can take it all apart, and put the aluminum block with the temp probe still in it in a vice. Then drill from the other side (opposite the thermocouple) with a small drill bit slightly larger than a paperclip wire. You will feel the drill suddenly move when it gets to the tiny air gap between aluminum and temp sensor. Pay attention or you will miss it. It's not so hard to notice. Then stop drilling and push a paper clip in and PUSH the sensor out (instead of pulling it out). I actually was able to do this on a UM2 block but never had to do this on the UMO block.

Yes - that's underextrusion could be many things. CAUSES FOR UNDEREXTRUSION AND HOW TO TEST FOR THEM AND REMEDY THEM As far as underextrusion causes - there's just so damn many. none of the issues seem to cause more than 20% of problems so you need to know the top 5 issues to cover 75% of the possibilities and 1/4 people still won't have the right issue. Some of the top issues: 1) Print slower and hotter! Here are top recommended 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. 2) Isolator - this is most common if you've printed extra hot (>240C) for a few hours or regular temps (220C) for 100 hours. It warps. It's the white part touching the heater block. Test it by removing it and passing filament though it by hand. 3) Curved filament at end of spool - if you are past half way on spool, try a fresh spool as a test. 4) curved angle feeding into feeder - put the filament on the floor -makes a MASSIVE difference. 5) Head too tight? Bizarrely MANY people loosen the 4 screws on the head by just a bit maybe 1/2 mm and suddenly they can print just fine! Has to do with pressure on the white teflon isolator. 5b) Bowden pushing too hard - for the same reason you don't want the bowden pushing too hard on the isolator. 5c) Spring pushing too hard. Although you want a gap you want as small as possible a gap between teflon isolator and steel isolator nut such that the spring is compressed as little as possible. 6) clogged nozzle - the number one problem of course - even if it seems clear. There can be build up on the inside of the nozzle that only burning with a flame can turn to ash and remove. Sometimes a grain of sand gets in there but that's more obvious (it just won't print). Atomic method (cold pull) helps but occasionally you need to remove the entire heater block/nozzle assembly and use flame. 7) Temp Sensor bad - even the good ones vary by +/- 5C and bad ones can be any amount off - they usually read high and a working sensor can fail high slowly over time. Meaning the sensor thinks you are at 220C but actually you are at 170C. At 170C the plastic is so viscous it can barely get out of the nozzle. You can verify your temp sensor using this simple video at youtube - on you tube search for this: mrZbX-SfftU 8) feeder spring issues - too tight, too loose 9) Other feeder issues, one of the nuts holding machine together often interferes with the feeder motor tilting it enough so that it still works but not very well. Other things that tilt the feeder motor, sleeve misaligned so it doesn't get a good grip. Gunk clogging the mechanism in there. 10) Filament diameter too big - 3mm is too much. 3mm filament is usually 2.85mm nominal or sometimes 2.9mm +/- .05. But some manufacturers (especially in china) make true 3.0mm filament with a tolerance of .1mm which is useless in an Ultimaker. It will print for a few meters and then clog so tight in the bowden you will have to remove the bowden from both ends to get the filament out. Throw that filament in the trash! It will save you weeks of pain 10b) Something wedged in with the filament. I was setting up 5 printers at once and ran filament change on all of them. One was slowly moving the filament through the tube and was almost to the head when I pushed the button and it sped up and ground the filament badly. I didn't think it was a problem and went ahead and printed something but there was a ground up spot followed by a flap of filament that got jammed in the bowden tube. 11) Hot weather. If air is above 30C or even possibly 25C, the air temperature combined with the extruder temperature can soften the filament inside the feeder such that it is getting squeezed flat as it passes through the feeder - this is obvious as you can see the problem in the bowden. The fix is to add a desk fan blowing on the back of the printer. 12) Crimped bowden. At least one person had an issue where the bowden was crimped a bit too much at the feeder and although the printer worked fine when new it eventually got worse and had underextrusion on random layers. it's easy to pull the bowden out of the feeder end and examine it.

You should always look at your part in layer view before copying it to the SD card. You would have seen that your part wasn't as square as you thought. It probably is rotated by 1 degree or something similar. Only a small part of your "cube" was actually within the bottom layer height (.06? .3mm?) of the bed. So it did the skirt around the part that *was* touching.

robotfuzz hasn't updated since the "plus" came out which uses a completely different circuit board. You are better off using the amedee version: https://bultimaker.bulles.eu/ The extruder will not turn unless the nozzle is above 170C. You can alternatively enable "cold extrusions" within pronterface by sending this gcode through pronterface. After power cycle cold extrusions are again disabled: M302

Sometimes a belt will slip on a pulley by one or two teeth - what happens is now the two blocks on the sides are not opposite each other and the rods are not perpendicular. This adds quite a bit to the resistance. Test it by pushing the blocks all the way to one end to see if they both stop at the same spot. Also by just looking from above to see if it looks perpendicular. Fix it by loosening the set screws in the pulleys re-align at the one end or the other and re-tighten. Tighten the hell out of those set screws - the shaft of the hex tool should twist slightly.

If you are into designing your own stuff you can save tons of money by doing the design work yourself and then order your parts through 3dhubs. then if you find yourself planning to spend more than the cost of a printer in parts you can finally buy one. This is also a good way to test out quality from various printers before you buy one and even go visit local people who own the printer you are thinking of buying. Most people on 3dhubs are happy to have you come pick up the part and chat a bit.