gr5

You have severe underextrusion - possibly ending with a nozzle clog due to the filament sitting inside the nozzle at high temp for hours but more likely ground up at the feeder and so no longer extruding. It can be caused by many things. What is your print speed? Heck here is my standard anser to causes of underextrusion - start with #1 and print slower (half speed) *and* 10C hotter. Another item I don't think is on the list below is if you have too many retractions it can suddenly stop printing due to filament ground flat. But you typically need a hundred retractions on the same layer. ============ 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) feeder spring issues - too tight, too loose 8) 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. 9) 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 9b) 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. 10) 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.

I think there will be an adapter kit to turn you 3mm ultimaker into a 1.75mm printer so that you don't have to throw away filament. This kit will be available at 3dsolex.com but until then I recommend you put it aside for a while and buy some 3mm filament (actually 2.85mm! 3mm filament is too large for the UM although most people who say 3mm mean 2.85 or 2.9). What country are you in anubis? If you are in Norway I can get you a free trial kit most likely. Or possibly in USA. Possibly.

You might want to check for other missing parts first.

Go to support.ultimaker.com. They will send you a new fan. If you are in the USA it will ship from Memphis.

You are about the 20th person to complain about this and it turned out that all 19 of the people before you had actually found a bug and didn't realize it. Fixing the bug made them much happier - if it weren't for autoslicing the Cura authors would never have known there was a bug. On my machine autoslicing works great - I can rotate the part, scale the part, change settings all lightning fast with zero delays. If you change something it somehow notifies the slicer which immediately stops slicing and starts over - it's really no big deal when it is working properly. But for you it is not working properly. There were MANY bugs - for example there was a bug related to certain model SD card readers and depended if your SD card was inserted or not. There were bugs that only affected certain operating systems, bugs related to video drivers, bugs related to virus scanners and so on. They were all eventually fixed but only because of people like you who were really pissed off about the autoslicing feature yet it turned out to be something else more important to fix. If those bugs weren't fixed the people like you wouldn't realize things like "slicing takes 10 seconds instead of 1 second due to a virus scanner", and so on. Regarding modifying your copy of cura I think it's pretty easy to just edit the python code as mentioned above. Hopefully someone else will give you more details.

Nice ears!

Mention that gr5 confirmed the bug and provide a link to your stl file.

@johannesk91 - What temperature and speed did you use for this print?

I have found that you can set nozzle size to lower values than the actual nozzle size by about 25% - so .3mm for a .4mm nozzle and 0.2 for a .2mm nozzle and so on. This will look even better if you do it with 2 colors like this:

Ultimaker shipped me one of the first ever UM2 Extendeds to try out. Unfortunately I had to return it. I had this problem with that printer - no matter what I did it had gaps between the two shell paths and infill wasn't touching very well - little gaps. Top layer looked bad also. Bottom layer was fine but only because I moved the bed closer to the nozzle. I went crazy trying to fix this - I printed a solid cube adjusting things in the tune menu on the fly. I tried higher and higher temps up to 240C. No change. I tried printing slower and slower down to 10mm/sec. no change. I checked the steps/mm setting - it was fine. I checked filament diameter - fine. Played with feeder spring tension. Eventually I just gave up and increased the flow to 110%. it worked great - I only wasted 6 hours on this but it was a non-stop experimenting and somewhat frustrating 6 hours. I did many prints on that machine including all the parts for my quadcopter and all of the test pieces for my quadcopter. It worked great as long as I was at 110%. I never figured it out but it didn't matter - once I modified flow it worked great.

PLA won't wear out your nozzle - you should be able to use it without changing the nozzle due to wear "forever". But if you use brassfill, stone fill, carbon fill, or other abrasive fills the nozzle might only last a few hours of printing before the tip gets ground down and twice the size which destroys quality. But PLA is fine. Did you try my "flow" suggestion?

If you can't get the parts for free from Ultimaker, conside getting them here: 3dsolex.com. They are excellent quality and having the olsson block is nice because then you can change nozzles much easier in the future and get different size nozzles and such.

Well the right thing to do is to add it to the bug tracker in github - you have to create a github account and then you get emails for every issue fixed and listed and discussed.

No need to wait. In top right corner next to machine name click drop down arrow and choose "configure printers", then under shell thickness check the box next to "wall line width" (leave the rest unchecked). Then in quality set wall line width to your nozzle size. That should be it I think. Although I don't know 100% that this is the only thing you have to do. I think in a newer release they just rename this parameter to nozzle size perhaps.

Very nice - except my printer does bridging pretty well - it's the cantilvered overhangs that are hard - like the chin on a person's head. I think you could do something similar for a chin - print it at a different angle and glue it on later or during the print. Still I like this idea. I have a new really cool idea similar to this - I hope to try it soon and will publish somewhere in tips&tricks.

Yes, I saw the same bug. This is definitely a bug. Cura probably thinks the area is too small to bother putting in infill. But it should do this. @nallath @daid - a bug in cura - if the infill area is only about 4 mm^2 or smaller then it seems to skip the infill.

lol!!! That's precious - I love that analogy!

no - dont' get netfabb. Just upload your model to the netfabb repair website and then download the repaired file. Also I don't recommend the latest cura - it's basically a beta. I don't know if it has the "fix horrible" settings anywhere - didn't notice them. Really the older cura can fix stuff like that.

I had a printer that printed just like that @mja. I never figured it out but solved the problem by increasing flow to 110%. It worked fine like that. I had to return the printer (it wasn't mine) and I haven't seen this problem since. But that flow change worked great and I stopped worrying about it.

Purchase a countersink like this one - you will find it useful for other things also:

It's probably touching the fan shroud - remove the 4 screws holding the fan shroud and let it hang and see if you can now heat up the nozzle okay.

Try another color - one half way to white such as gray or light blue or red. Also try white. You get very different results with different colors as the reflections may or may not show up details. Also you have flat faces that tend to show off errors. If you printed for example a 3d shark instead of this 2d shark you might like the results better - but what you see is probably typical. You could also consider getting a smaller nozzle - such as a .25mm nozzle but your prints will take 4X longer so I don't recommend that.

It's hard to tell but that looks like reasonale quality to me. Although when I want high quality I never go over 35mm/sec, because of the shape of this model you won't get much improvement at lower speed - basically the tip of the tail fins will be more sharp and less weird/blobby. The walls/top and bottom won't be affected much. To get the bottom layer a little better you have to mess with the leveling - DO NOT run the leveling procedure as your are very close already and that will just make it worse - you need to instead adjust the 3 wheels 1/4 turn at a time at the most. But in which direction? I don't know - it looks pretty good already. If you make glass closer to nozzle it squeezes out and bottom layer has a brim even without selecting it. If you make it too far you get gaps in the lines like in this photo.

Also when printing this bearing the bottom layer is very critical. I use zero brim. And I adjust the 3 bed screws so that you get ZERO extra filament on the bottom layer - it must not touch - gears must not touch housing or each other on the bottom layer. The remaining layers are easy. I also printed this slow for good quality - 35mm/sec and cool - 210C. It came out great - I can spin it and it coasts for about 1 to 2 full seconds - maybe 10 full rotations. People are always amazed at this one. I dont' know about the 75% scaling but the new cura (15.6.*) has a lot of bugs - I'm still using 15.4. 15.6 is kind of like a beta version but it's getting better! Some day soon I hope to use the new one. When they fix more bugs.

You probably had a tangle that caused that one horizontal band of underextrusion. It's good to pay a lot attention to the spool so it's not smart to put it on the back of the machine where it's hidden. I usually print with the printer sideways and the spool on the floor so that I am more likely to notice a tangle. Once you get a tangle you can't fix it until the print is over (in theory you can but I'm not smart enough) and you can take the filament out of the printer and pass it under the "knot" or "tangle". Once the tangle is fixed the spool should be good forever unless you let the end get under a loop again. I now am very careful to never let that happen so I always stick the end of the filament through one of the holes to keep it under control during storage.