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I think quality is about the same. It's not called the "1" because it has been updated and the UMO could be said to be a newer design than the UM2. When the UMO got the heated bed kit it became a much better printer. If you aren't afraid of assembling it then go for it.

Also this is your chance to do last minute leveling with the 3 screws. With the wooden bed UMO that was important. I still like it with the UM2 because my leveling might be great for many parts that print in the center but when I switch to a larger part I might notice it's too close/far in the back or on the front or whatever.

Heat the block to 180C and then just start removing the extra PLA and then you can unscrew things while hot. Be gentle using wrenches as brass and aluminum are not as strong as steel.

Not so hard to do. Advice varies depending on material and printer so please note which printer you have in your profile settings and are we talking about PLA or ABS? 1) 50C minimum bed temp for PLA (you mention 70C - that's fine also). 2) Use brim - this is very very important - that's why it's on the basic settings on the first page. at least 5 passes if it's a large part. Maybe 10 passes. 3) glue - if you just use the glue stick the simplest way you get too much glue. glue stick, elmers wood glue (my favorite) and hair spray all have some PVA in them. I have tried all 3. All 3 work well for both ABS and PLA. My favorite is Elmers Wood glue mixed with about 10 parts water, 1 part glue in a glass jar, shake well, apply with paint brush, let dry. Actually 50 parts water might be better as I often later squirt with water for the next print and respread with paint brush and the more dilute it gets the stronger it seems to be.

Yes. I haven't tried it but I hear it's extremely easy to run and "fixes" your model for free. I don't know if it will combine your model into one piece or not. meshlab has a ton of features for that kind of thing - maybe if you google something like "meshlab - combine multiple parts into one" or something like that someone will explain how to do it.

Did you try the netfabb suggestion? I'd try that first - it might hopefully combine your stuff. If that doesn't I'm sure meshlab can help. I've never done this before - combine 300 small parts into one solid part - so I'm not sure how to do it. Every cad program is different. For example a lot of the modern cad progrms like solidworks I think have "boolean operations". You could union all those parts into one part using that. If you only come to visit this list once per month it may take years for you to get answers. Try coming twice per day. And start with netfabb.

The most common (and obvious) issues are that it often won't print certain parts of your model - thin sections such as a thin wall or an antenna or something < 1mm thick. The other common issue is that it fills in holes that are meant to be open. More difficult issues to spot is when it prints "in mid air". Imagine you are printing a model of a standing person whose arms and hands and fingers are all pointing down to the ground but also held away from the body. Those finger tips will be printed in mid-air and just fall down to the bed. Bridging works great on 3d printers - for example if you have a wall with a square opening it will print the top of the opening just fine. But if it is an arched opening - it will work - but the quality won't be so great.

lol. Okay a few things. When it is priming the nozzle you should grab that so it doesn't get into the print and just when the head moves to the center to start printing, pull that away from the head so the strand to the nozzle gets very very thin. The worst problem is that your plate is too far from the nozzle so the ABS isn't sticking - don't run leveling procedure - instead rotate the 3 thumb screws about 1/4 turn counter clockwise looking from below (maybe more but start with 1/4 turn). When it starts printing look at the initial traces and if not flatened a bit then unscrew another 1/8 turn each). Make sure your nozzle is at leat 240C. Or even 250 or 260C. But 240C is hot enough to proceed. Make sure the bed is at least 100C. 110C is better but you might not have the power to reach that without enclosing the machine. You have too much glue - take a wet tissue and spread that glue around a bit. When it dries it should be invisible. Add about 1 tablespoon water, (soup spoon worth) and spread it around and remove some glue by throwing away the first tissue you use. Just worry about the area you will be printing on for now. Also make sure your fan never gets above 50% power. At 240C with any fan at all you won't get great layer to layer adhesion (the new layers won't melt the existing layers as they go down). It will be strong enough for some things but not as amazingly strong as ABS can sometimes be. So 250C would be better (and 30% fan) but then your white teflon part won't last as long. I also recommend you stick with one material for hundreds of prints. Everytime you switch materials you will have headaches.

Be patient. Set them all to 25mm/sec - just for once to see how it looks. Everytime you speed up you get underextrusion for a portion of a second. Everytime you slow down you get overextrusion very briefly. This affects quality. Just try it ALL at 25mm/sec. Just so you know. Except travel speed! Keep that at 150mm/sec. Or faster.

Also some colors show up tiny defects more than other colors. A white filament will hide most of that nicely. Or primer paint.

Try unchecking "combing". This will change things quite a bit. But you still might not like the results. Also if you want really good quality do this: 1) Make ALL printing speeds 25mm/sec (and movement speed at least 150mm/sec). 2) Set temperature to 210 or lower 3) layer height .1mm. This might eliminate those marks. Or possibly not. But in general printing slower helps because you get best results when the extruder never slows down or speeds up and printing at 25mm/sec allows that to happen for the most part.

Could you post the gcode for that boat please? I want to look at it in a gcode viewer.

This is underextrusion. Severe underextrusion - it's printing with only about half the desired material. I'm not sure what is causing it and why it shows up late in your prints. This is a bit unusual. Here are some theories that might explain what you see - from most likely to least likely - I'm sure you can quickly eliminate some of these. 1) Feeder stepper motor driver is overheating and turning on and off frequently. Are you printing in a hot room? Consider removing the larger bottom cover (just 1 or 2 screws), putting the printer on it's side (it prints fine that way) and having a desk fan cool the board - just as an experiment). 2) Feeder motor is getting hot and losing power 3) Temperature is dropping - something wrong with the temp sensor - this is actually kind of common - you can get a partial open circuit in the temp probe and it ends up reading high so that printer sends less heat to the nozzle. 4) outer shell speed is a bit too fast - I know you say 30mm/sec which is fine but could that be overridden by advanced settings? Does it appear to print much faster on the shell than infill? 5) knurled sleeve on motor is slipping but only when motor gets hot (try tightening the tiny set screw). 6) feeder motor gets so hot that the PLA is compressed and squeezed too much and then later gets stuck in the bowden. 7) too many retractions is squeezing the filament too flat and gets stuck in the bowden (look at the filament inside the bowden - is it squished flat on one side?) I'm sure I can come up with more theories - check these first.

Wisar please note your printer type in your profile settings as sometimes answers change depending if you have UMO, UM2, or third party.

Which stripes? You mean: 1) the diagonal stripes on the upper part of the boat? 2) the vertical stripes on the railng? 3) The strange pattern on the curved hull? (looks like underextrusion maybe) 4) horizontal stripes on hull? 1mm shell is bad - it means it will make 2 .5mm passes and that means pushing .5mm of filament through a .4mm nozzle or 25% extra. This is more than 25% harder to do! This is like twice as hard to do because it is squeezing the filament into a small area between the nozzle shoulder and the part. It takes much more pressure so you need to print at half speed you would typically print at. Your bottom layer of your boat looks not so good - you should skip the leveling procedure and instead just rotate the 3 leveling screws 1/4 turn counter clockwise looking from below to get the glass closer to the nozzle. This is because you want the bottom layer squished in a little better. Not doing this may be fine for this small part but you run the risk of parts coming off the glass if you don't do this.

Hex infill is slower than straight lines. Hex infill is also a little stronger. usb printing works on UM2 but it is not supported and not recommended. But it works fine if you have the right USB driver and cable (some computers work fine, some get lots of checksum errors). UM2 can go up to 300mm/sec on a normal UMO or UM2. Not sure what this has to do with slicers. The makerbot machine is much slower not because of max speed, but because of jerk and acceleration which are set much higher on UM machines than on machines where the feeder sits on the print head.

There's many possibilities but the most likely is that the filament is ground down at the feeder. Peek inside the feeder to see if it looks all ground up in there like someone cutting half way through a tree with an ax. You'll have to remove the bowden at one end to get it out - I recommend removing it at the feeder in this particular case. First heat up the nozzle to 180C. Then, to remove bowden from feeder, first remove the horse shoe shaped colored clip that holds up the bowden-holder. Then push down firmly on the bowden holder - this is critical - if it won't go down push harder - certainly don't pull up on the bowden until the bowden-holder is moved down slightly. Once it is down pull up on the bowden tube while holding the holder down. Inside the bowden holder are 4 metal blades - if you do it wrong they will remove a little bit of material on the outside of the bowden and make it so that you can't hold the bowden down next time. Once that is out and you have exposed a few inches of PLA you can pull up on the pla from above the feeder at the same time as pushing from below. Or the other way around. Or pull from both ends and try to break it in the middle if you want but that might be too difficult. I's helpful to have the nozzle at 180C all this time. Once you get the PLA out, inspect the tube for a small piece of PLA just in case - you don't want that binding the new piece of filament on your next attempt at printing.

Cura has a save mesh? I didn't know it had that. Why would it have that? To save scaling and rotation maybe?

Definitely that can cause issues - but you can feel that when loading by hand. I still think it's getting in the gap between bowden and teflon.

If the rod moved far enough to fall into the machine then it's definitely something that needs fixing but fortunately it's trivial if you have a 2mm hex wrench. Put the rod in and center it and then on the other side you should notice that the pulley can slide back and forth (it's not supposed to). Push it against the wall and then tighten the set screw very tight. These need to be so tight that you are twisting the hex tool a bit. Very tight. Also slide the head towards that side to see that the belt is lined up over or under the rod. If not you will see the belt is going into the pulley at an angle. You want that to be as straight as possible but if you just push it outward like I said earlier and tighten it then it should be in the right spot. Now the rod shouldn't fall out anymore. Regarding the friction - that is the friction of the steppers. It's a bit of force as valcrow says but if you put one finger on each opposite block (two fingers total) then you should be able to move the head easily - even with your smallest finger a normal person should have the strength.

What version of printer do you have? UMO? UM2? And can you check your version of Marlin please? I know this was a bug on the UM2 at some point and I don't know if it ever got fixed but after you answer my questions someone else might answer you. Also please update your profile to indicate what country you are in and what printer(s).

One more thing - I can't tell in your pictures but you want the threaded tube that is in the aluminum block and the peek to be low enough such that you can't screw the main nozzle quite all the way up to the aluminum block. If the nozzle is touching the aluminum block that is bad because it means you have another space for plastic to flow into and you are also more likely to get a PLA leak. Although I don't think this is your issue as any plastic flowing out will be molten in that area long before the nozzle is up to temp.

By the way - did you have lots of retractions? didn't you already answer that? Sorry I didn't re-read everything. Each retraction moves heat upwards a little bit. Also longer retractions move it up faster. 4.5mm should be plenty. Still I've never had this problem you describe. I'm thinking there is a tiny gap between bowden and teflon part. Did you put it together such that the 4 thumb screws are a few turns loose when you put the bowden in? You want the 4 screws loose by maybe 2 to 4 full turns and then lift on the bowden clip/holder while inserting the bowden. Then while still lifting, screw the 4 screws in slowly so the bowden is seated nicely onto the teflon. This will compress slightly any gaps that filament might flow into. You know you got it right because then you no longer need the horseshoe shaped clip anymore - the force of the lifting bowden holds itself in place.

The feeder can push about 5kg or about 10 pounds. So the resistance in the bowden has to be at least 1 pound to be significant. Which is possible but I think unlikely. I recommend you post these pictures over on the google groups forum - those people are more knowledgable for UMO issues (even though I have one and have used it for years - I never had this specific problem): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ultimaker

Okay - after speaking with 3 people in support now it sounds like there are probably 2 different rings - a longer ring that sticks out like in the photo above and a shorter ring where it doesn't stick out at all. The only "wrong" way to assemble it ends up having it fall right off. So as long as it isn't falling off then it's assembled correctly.