gr5

I have unlimited hosting from bluehost. Quality service. But I don't want to set up a wiki. If I did I'd probably do tikiwiki. It's pretty amazing. But it should be set up on a host that will still be around 10 years later. That people have some confidence in. Someone very good has to get it started or no one will contribute. It's just a ton of work and I don't see it happening at this point.

The first one: http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/23-a-visual-ultimaker-troubleshooting-guide http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/30-getting-better-prints http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/38-designing-for-3d-printing

Add oil to the filament. I tell everyone to do it, but people are afraid to do it. They think the oil will somehow cause pockets or something. It doesn't. They think it will make the knobbed sleeve too slippery. It doesn't. Just do it. Take the filament out of the bowden add a drop or two of light oil, put it back in. Then loop the filament down to the floor and put 1 drop of oil every meter or so and it should run down the filament towards the floor. If that's not enough just slow it down some more and heat it up some more. To get absolutely perfectly smooth top surfaces I had to slow it to 10mm/sec and heat to 240C and add oil. You can get almost as good at higher speeds or lower temps.

hexagon infill prints slower than lines. If you want to print fast with .4mm nozzle try no infill, 2 shells (architectural stuff prints pretty good with no infill and it's so much faster). So .8mm walls/shell. 0.2mm layers. Do 240C and print as fast as you can without underextruding. Around 50 to 75mm/sec. Make sure ALL your printing speeds are set to the same speed - by default I think infill is much faster - maybe 80mm/sec? Having different speeds causes problems. If you get a .6mm nozzle then you can do a single pass wall instead of 2 passes. And again print .2mm (maybe .3mm) layers but now you can cool it down to maybe 210C. Quality won't be as good at these higher speeds but it will probably be as good or better than the makerbot. If you want high quality slow it down to .1mm layers, 35mm/sec, 210C. 2 shells (.8mm shell) .4mm nozzle of course and be patient. Good quality takes many horus.

FYI - Swordriff has learned more. The nozzles I have sold and most of the ones he has sold are fine. The "good" 0.25mm nozzles have one dot on them. Not sure of the configuration for the "bad" nozzles and not sure how they look different as I haven't seen one yet.

I've never used the netfabb thing on the web - but it's a free service where you upload your model to netfabb - it fixes it - and sends it back to you. You might not like the fix (it might remove most of your model). Play with all the fix horrible settings and look at the results in slice view. To save time set your layer height temporarily to .5mm or 1mm - just so you can quickly try all 11 combinations of fix horrible (clicking A and B both is redundant so don't do that).

Well with the .4mm nozzle I think of .1mm as slow, .2mm as fast and .15 in between. There's a tradeoff of speed and quality. If you want extra high quality you have to print extra slow - not just thinner layers but actually move the head more slowly as well. It's hard to compare makerbot to ultimaker speeds because a 50mm/sec print on ultimaker goes much faster than 50mm/sec on makerbot - this is because the acceleration values are much higher. The acceleration values are higher on ultimaker because there is no feeder on the head so the head is light weight. This high acceleration means that a 50mm long trace of plastic at 50mm/sec actually prints in about a second on UM but the Makerbot never gets up to speed so prints much slower. Cura now takes into account the acceleration of the UM in it's calculations as of about a year ago. If you have a UMO then there are lots of resellers for nozzles. Ebay is okay. Some of the nozzles have too large or too small of a "shoulder" and so the quality isn't always great. If you have a UM2 then you should get the olsson block which lets you change nozzles and you can use any standard e3dv6 nozzle with um2. I'm not sure if the e3dv6 nozzles work with UMO. I think they do. The ones from UK are very good quality. 3dsolex also has very good quality nozzles. For the olsson block and e3dv6 nozzles, if you are in usa go to my store at gr5.org/store/. If not in usa start at 3dsolex.com. If you buy e3dv6 nozzles from UK seller make sure not to get the 1.75mm filament nozzles - get the 3mm filament nozzles.

Newbie guides are too much work. It needs to be a wiki because anyone should be able to add to it. It needs to be very visual so people can quickly scan for their issue. It needs to present simple answers quickly but also in-depth answers for people who need to know more. The best guides so far are these but they aren't a wiki so I can't contribute and they are hosted by a company that may go out of business some day - it needs to be hosted on something that will outlast any of us. http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/23-a-visual-ultimaker-troubleshooting-guide http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/30-getting-better-prints http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/38-designing-for-3d-printing

It does? I've never seen this issue before - this is the first video I have seen of it. Please provide a link to another issue with the water and steam. If you can find 2 people with this issue I will try to get it into IRobertI's guide.

I completely agree! My recommendations only actually work for ultimaker gray and blue. I have also found different results from different colors from the same manufacturer in fact I'd have to say color maters more than manufacturer! But both are significant. My recommended speeds are at half the "limit" that I have found for my UMO and my UM2 using UM gray and blue. I figure they are reasonably conservative for newbies who have a brand new printer and UM brand filament. But that could be wrong. I will in the future add a disclaimer. I also have tested 10 different temp sensors and a few of them are off by 10C! The rare bad ones appear to always error on the hot side which results in a nozzle cooler than "normal".

So.... I should mark all my current .25 nozzles as .35 now? And charge extra for the limited edition .35mm nozzles?

Here is a good video by peter showing the best way to do the glue - this is the best way I found also - 2 minutes in:

By the way, my understanding of 4 wire stepper motors like on the UM printers is that you have 2 wires going to one coil and 2 wires to the other. You send sine waves down both pairs of wires and to perform a 1/16 microstep you shift one of those sine waves by 1/16 of a phase.

Yes. Of course. One of the 16 microsteps is larger than the other 15. A DAC has the largest error when stepping from mostly ones to mostly zeroes so 15-to-0 would be the step with the most potential error. But this is unlikely the issue. It's easy to make an accurate 4 bit DAC. Instead I think it has more to do with magnets and stepper motor construction and such. For example when power is off, the motor has intrinsic stability points - you can feel it as you turn it that it prefers to be at certain positions (steps). As you are microstepping you might be fighting that (going up hill) for 8 steps and then "downhill" for the next 8 steps. maybe. I'm not a stepper motor expert. Anyway that transition to downhill may be where the most movement occurs. Maybe a good stepper driver is supposed to compensate for that? Or be tuned? I really don't know.

You got some water on your filament. Remove the filament and make sure it is dry. When the very small drop of water gets in the head it boils and pushes out some filament quickly until the head is empty and then nothing comes out until all the steam is pushed out.

This happened to me also. Very easy to fix. Loosen the set screw on the pulley closest to where the rod slips outside the box. Then push the rod in and slide the pulley outward against the wall and retighten the pulley. Tighten the hell out of that set screw. Make sure you have a 2mm hex wrench or you'll strip it. You want it so tight that the tool twists!

I don't understand what you are trying to say. For me .15mm layer is slow print. If I want a quick print I switch to .8mm nozzle and do .4mm layers. That prints quite fast.

180C is plenty hot enough for atomic pull for PLA on the hot side - at 180C you want to push the filament in, and then let it cool to the lowest temp where you can still pull it out. For the standard UM2 nozzle that's around 90C - 95C. Going up to 260C is a waste of time because you have to wait longer for it to cool.

The sounds it is making sound normal to me. It looks like it stops extruding towards the end - or extrudes very little. 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. 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.

>So why is Cura the software coming up with print times 3X as Curaengine in Repetier? About a year ago the print times that Cura claimed were way off. It would typically print much slower - especially if there were many short moves because the printer has to slow down on each corner - each vertex. Cura fixed this about a year ago and now has pretty accurate print times. I don't think slicer does this. So the print time out of slic3r may be innacurate. Anyway, I suggest you try a large cube which has lots of long straight lines and maybe try 50mm/sec. Try doing only single pass shell width (.4 and .5mm) make sure layer height is the same, turn off infill for both, turn off top and bottom. See what you get then turn things back on one at a time to see what's different. There's other things like "min layer time" that can really slow down a small part but doesn't affect a large part (say 100mm cube).

Well the bowden might be too tight against the white teflon part. That might be one difference. Regarding the 4 long screws - that sounds pretty bad - I would get that fixed first. Seriously. Before it runs out of warranty or you break something or whatever. Please update your country settings in your profile. Your english seems pretty good so I'm going to guess USA - if so then the support service is pretty good there (It's in memphis if you bought it through the website). Create a support ticket at support.ultimaker.com. Include a photograph or 10 second video about the screw issue.

inad - please post a photo. There are 20 things that can cause "bad quality". Here are some hints: http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/23-a-visual-ultimaker-troubleshooting-guide

1) It looks like a batmobile! 2) why would it be coming inward to a wall? Is there another part like valcrow asks? 3) What is your layer setting? That looks very fine - I have troubles when I go much thinner than .06mm. Or at least I get different issues. Do you have retraction turned on? Actually why don't you do "file" "save profile" and then post the entire file here please. what these *look* like to me are when I do "cool head lift" on a small layer and the head moves away from the part for 5 seconds and some pla leaks out and then when the head returns to the print it adds a little tail to the print. These tails are very easy to remove. But you seem to be getting tails on layers where the head should never leave the outer shell.

By the way - doing only #5 or only #1 might be enough for your particular models but if you use all 8 inches of glass you will need all the methods. I left out #6: 6) since it is the upper layers that are pulling it inward, try to reduce this by putting large vertical holes through your part. Of course for your models this is bad but for say the arm of a quadcopter this will not only reduce lifting but reduce wasted material without reducing strength.

This is a very common problem with very easy solutions (curling corners). The problem is that the material shrinks as it cools and as the upper layers cool (say 2mm above the base) it is pulling hard inward like bungee cords pulling the walls inward. This causes the corners to lift up. One (not necessary) solution is to keep the air at the glass temperature for the material you are printing which for PLA this is about 50C. But this is not the best solution - the best solution is to just make it "stick like hell" to the bed. On the UM2 you should be printing on glass. 1) Make sure the glass is clean if you haven't cleaned it for a few weeks. You want a very thin coat of PVA glue which is found in hairspray, glue stick, wood glue. If you use glue stick or wood glue you need to dilute it with water - about 5 to 10 parts water to 1 part glue. So for example if you use glue stick, apply only to the outer edge of your model then add a tablespoon of water and spread with a tissue such that you thin it so much you can't see it anymore. wood glue is better. hairspray doesn't need to be diluted. When it dries it should be invisible. This glue works well for most plastics. 2) Heat the bed. This helps the plastic fill in completely (no air pockets) so you have better contact with the glass. For PLA any temp above 40C is safe. I often print at 60C bed. 3) heat the bed (didn't I already say that?). Keeping the bottom layers above the glass temp of the material makes it so the bottom layers can flex a bit (very very tiny amount) and relieve the tension/stress. For PLA 60C is better than 50C. 70C is even better but then you get other "warping" like issues at the corners where they move inward but if you are desperate it's worth it. For ABS you want 110C (100C is good enough). 4) rounded corners - having square corners puts all the lifting force on a tiny spot. Rounding the corner spreads the force out more. This is optional if you use brim. 5) Brim - this is the most important of all. Turn on the brim feature in cura and do 10 passes of brim. This is awesome. If you do all this you will then ask me "how the hell do I get my part off the glass?". Well first let it cool completely. Or even put it in the freezer. Then use a sharp putty knife under a corner and it should pop off.