gr5

You mean on your feeder? The screw just left of this arrow head? I don't know the answer but everything Ultimaker seems to be metric so probably 3mm or maybe 2.5 or 2mm. Probably 3mm.

I would modify this slightly and say "when you want best possible quality you want to minimize or eliminate sudden speed changes". Having bottom layer slower is not an issue. The problem will only last for about 1/2 second or less from when the speed change occurrs. Lots of people print 100mm/sec no problem but you don't get nearly as good quality. It depends if you are making artwork or merely something functional. In fact if you don't care so much about quality but do care about speed then it's also good to use a larger nozzle. A .8mm nozzle prints 4 times faster.

EXACTLY what labern said. Switching speeds can cause blobs (but it depends where it happens so it might be unrelated) but keep infill same - keep all speeds the same if you want it perfect. I prefer to make infill faster but perfection is not so important to me. Slower. Colder. More fan. Different fan shroud (but some fan shrouds are *worse* so it needs to be well vetted).

Nylon is good because it stretches so much. I found that the temperature changes quite a bit if you use solex block with e3d nozzles (you need higher temperatuer) and it doesn't work as well. Not just like 10C hotter but like 40C hotter! I haven't tried the new jet set nozzles yet which may be better for cold pull. The inside of the e3d nozzles from the UK have tiny ridges down inside the nozzle. Nylon might stretch past these ridges more easily I would think. I've found other variations on the ideal temperature for a cold pull. But once you find it for a particular material and printer it is pretty consistent and you get very good at it.

You could try fbrc8.com - they are officialy reseller of UM parts for USA but their web store doesn't list much and they might not service canada and they might not stock UMO parts. But I recommend sending them an email just to find out. You can get this board from other sellers - it's close enough to a standard reprap ramps board that you can use those but you might have to swap one wire or so that goes to the ulticontroller. But there are many people on the forum who have purchased alternate boards. Still you should be able to get the UMO without any trouble from Ultimaker. I'm not sure what the issue is.

This discussion group was created before 3dhubs. Now that 3dhubs exists I strongly suggest you use them to order a small part and select someone with an ultimaker 2. It will only cost you around 20 pounds if you pick something small enough. And you can pick someone probalby within a half hour drive and meet them and see their ultimaker2 in action.

It looks like your Z axis is moving too far such that the first layer is perfect, the second layer might be a little too high but close enough but by the time you get to the 3rd or 4th layer it is laying down plastic in air and dropping it down onto the part. Alternatively it could be moving the E axis "not enough" but those traces look nice and fat to me. Did you use Cura in "ultigcode" mode or "reprap" mode (machine settings). And did you tell Cura the proper filament diameter? It's easier to screw up Extruder amounts in Cura but it sure looks more like a Z issue like you have a jumper wrong and the Z axis is moving twice as far as it should.

Too many questions! The two printers print with the same quality as far as I can tell. I have one of each. But I usually use the UM2. The kit takes quite a long time to put together (took me about 40 hours - I guess I'm not very fast) and I ran into lots of snags but figured it all out eventually. So if you don't mind "wasting" 40 hours then go UMO I think. If you are printing extra small things and want extra good qualtiy (e.g. jewelry) then you will want to get a .25mm nozzle which you can get for either machine now through 3rd party sellers. PLA is a newer technology and almost everyone prints PLA these days but still lots of people are die hard ABS people. Both materials are fantastic. The main advantage of ABS is that it can be left on a car seat on a hot sunny summer day and it won't melt like PLA will. This is pretty important for many people. PLA is much easier to print with and less hassle and comes out looking a little bit nicer especially if you are new at this. Many people on the forum print non-stop. It's fine. Both printers are very easy to service. You pretty much need only one tool - a screwdriver version of a 2mm hex allen wrench and you can take apart everything on both printers with very few exceptions (I think there's one screw that's 1.5mm and that's it on the um2). Customer support even expects you to take things apart as they often just send you for example a new circuit board. Customer support is not great (well it's a bit slow but they are great people and smart) but it's typical of 3d printer companies and support is probably much better than makerbot. Make sure you get an open system that uses open firmware and open slicers and such - no one realizes how incredibly important this is until it's too late. For example lulzbot is open. And ultimaker of course. Don't worry about spares or precautions. Could be as much as 2 weeks to get repaired if you are unlucky - more likely 1 week. Much faster in USA. It's best *not* to plug computer in at all - ultimaker works best if it prints from SD card (included). See? Here's where you absolutely need open source. There are plugins to Cura - "tweak at Z" that will let you change speeds part way through the print. It already lets you print infill faster than outer shell. Download Cura for free and check it out. Get any STL model from thingerverse.com and load it into cura and slice it and look at it in slice view and slide the slider around. software.ultimaker.com For CAD software - if you are doing things like parts, covers, mechanical stuff get (it's free) "design spark mechanical". Like all cad it has a bit of a learning curve to be efficient. If you are more of an artist and want to model things like animals or people then don't get dsm! I forget what the most popular artist software is that is free right now. zbrush is popular but I believe that's expensive. Maybe meshmixer? or blender? or meshlab? (all free) I really don't know.

This is a bug that I have experienced also. Not sure if it's fixed in latest firmware but what I do is when I power on the machine and my hand is near the back I often grab the filament where it enters the feeder and slide it in a little more if it will go. The feeder motor has no power when you first turn on power.

You really don't need a heated chamber for PLA. When you *do* build one I recommend not letting it get much over 50C (It's actually difficult to get it to go much hotter) mostly because the steppers are in there also. But for PLA and especially for voronoi structures you want things on the cool side and a heated chamber might actually hurt you a bit. The key for voronoi with it's many overhangs is to print cooler - maybe 200C and print slower like 1mm^3/sec (e.g. 25mm/sec at .1mm layer). And most important of all -- FAN. Lots of fan. 100% fan. Maybe swap out fan shroud with one that has been well tested to do overhangs well. But the existing fan shroud is pretty good.

I've seen older slicers (before cura) that were written back "before pla" and those are funny as the fan will come on for just a few seconds during a bridge or overhang and then shut completely off again for the rest of the printing.

If you enclose the front and more importantly the top, then you can up the fans a bit. Fans tend to reduce the quality for ABS a bit but you need them for good overhangs. I'm really not an ABS expert but I recommend more fan. And especially go for the enclosure as you want more fan but with warmer air. If you cover the top of the printer with one of those boxes that holds copier paper it fits perfectly and leaves a reasonable size hole in the back where the bowden is but facing downward. Combine that with a sealed front and 100C bed and you get about 40C air temp inside which helps reduce shrinkage. Let it warm up in there for a while before you start printing.

Everything the posts above say is basically all you need to know. Quick summary: - Fan is incredibly critical for overhangs - make sure the 2 side fans are working ( they might come on slowly). - Printing cooler helps a little with overhangs - 210C should be plenty cool enough though. - Printing slower helps with almost every quality issue including these blobs. Bed temperature is irrelevant to this issue once you get about 3mm above the bed.

Perfect. But where did you measure the resistance? Try measuring underneath the printer. Often you get an open where you screw down the wires on the bed or in the solder joints where the terminal block solders to the heated bed. Have you ever inserted a 4.7K resistor in the circuit board? If so you need to remove it. This detail is not mentioned I believe in the instructions.

I use Cura mostly in ultigcode mode but Daid added a feature recently where it heats the bed *most* of the way to full temp before heating the nozzle. Then he heats the bed and the nozzle the remaining amount. So maybe this is now implemented in gcode also. Is there a second M190 later on in the gcode? Or a M140? M190 is "set temp and wait until it gets there". M140 is "set temp but don't wait".

70C is too hot for the bed. I know it's the default for most UM2's but 50C is plenty hot for PLA and there is no improvement at higher temps. This could be the problem if the part fell over when you were done and sat on the bed for a full 20 seconds at 70C. But I doubt that happened. I often think I've seen "every kind of print issue" but this is new to me - I've never printed out something quite this kind of shape. Does it have to be hollow inside? Could you put a vertical support wall touching that curved wall while it prints and cut it out later? You definitely also want to add brim on the basic tab under "support structure". Those are my two pieces of advice and will help some things but won't help this issue you asked about. Could it be fan related? The fan can really make prints better but you don't have any overhangs or bridging that I see so maybe put the fan at 30% and see if that makes any difference - just a guess here.

Your atomic pull looks perfect. I would stop doing that. Instead concentrate on using the guitar wire to clean out only the bottom 3mm or so of the nozzle hole. Move it around in a circle and pretend it's a file or sandpaper or something like that and you are scraping it clean (cleaner). Alternatively take out the nozzle and then put the nozzle in flame and burn that stuff to ash but don't melt the bronze!

I know you want to keep your location secret but often it's helpful simply to know what country you live in. I can't tell you to get "nappy's at the telecom store" if you live in USA. In this case though I don't care. Cura does *not* treat the center of the nozzle as the path but instead uses another number. That number is very simple as long as shell width is a multiple of your nozzle width (e.g. .4, .8, 1.2 etc). If you keep that correct it will draw the circle .2mm larger than the STL file shows. I know this is hard to believe. The problem with vertical holes being .4mm too small is very common! It isn't really Cura's fault. It is caused by 3 factors but the main contributor is that PLA acts like snot in the first few milliseconds as it is cooling - it is a sticky liquid. Kind of like a liquid rubber band. As it is laid down in a circle with air in the middle it is pulled inward because it shrinks so fast (cools so fast) yet is still a liquid. This problem also happens on exteriors with a small radius of curvature (like a zero radius of curvature for corners) although it is automatically coincidentally compensated by minor over extrusion when it slows down for corners. The best solution by far is to increase all vertical holes (not horizontal though!) by about .4mm.

Maybe you got a nice flat temperature graph (3rd and last graph) because earlier the fan was blowing off the bed or the part and wind was bouncing back up onto the e3d and in 3rd graph your bed may have been out of the way.

In your first graph you can see the *goal temp* is consistently at something around 220C. So there was no need to look at the gcode. The display on the UMO also shows two temperatures: actual, and goal. I'm pretty sure the actual temp is showing correctly. I have printed many things at 180C. Especially the higher quality filaments. But you have to print a bit slower. Anyway something is seriously wrong with your PID values. A quick fix would be to adjust them by the amount of wattage change for your heater. So for example a heater designed to work at 24V and 30W will put out 30*(19/24)^2 or 18.8 watts at 19V. I don't know what the wattage is for the original UM. I would then divide all the PID values by the ratio of the new heater divided. So for example if UMO is 40W (I'm not sure) and new heater is 20W then double the 3 PID values. This is just to get close. Then I would try to auto tune. Take your time - do maybe 10 cycles. Read about M301, M303, M500, M503 on this web page: http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code#M301:_Set_PID_parameters Use M503 to read back current PID values. Make sure to save your new values before you turn off the printer with M500. Also write down the original values in case the new values are bad. Also your PID may actually be just fine. Consider that maybe the fan is blowing on the heater now. Maybe you need to insulate your e3d a bit from the wind using some kapton tape. Or maybe angle the fan down just below the tip of the nozzle and keep the wind off the rest.

I recommend you order one of those i2k isolator things here: http://3dsolex.com/ And then also print around 260C. 245C is fine for parts that are going to sit on a shelf but if it needs any strength at all I don't think 245 is enough either. The problem with printing at 260C all the time is your teflon isolator will not last very long - maybe 50 hours? Not sure. It will start to deform. The ABS probably won't care but when you switch back to PLA you will have lots of underextrusion problems.

My town recycles all types of plastics. Including PET (XT) and ABS. By law in USA everything has a number on the bottom from 1 to 9. My town doesn't care and all types go into the same recycling bin. Some towns only recycle certain numbers. ABS is #9 (sometimes it says ABS) PET is #1 (I assume XT is also #1) PLA is #7 Maybe things are different in France?

I did not mean to imply titanium is sticky! Sorry! I'm just saying it *might* be sticky. I'm just saying *most* materials are going to stick to liquid PLA that then cools to solid. I don't know about titanium. It's not a problem in the nozzle - it's a problem in the zone where it is sometimes liquid, sometimes solid. That's the job of the white teflon isolator - to transfer between the liquid and solid stages.

@ganon - UMO or UM2? Please update your settings to indicate what kind of printer you have. PM dude is correct that it is ringing. Usually fixed by lowering acceleration. some filaments show it more than others. Also at some temperatures it is worse than others. Tightening belt on a UMO might help - but really it just raises the frequency without necessarily dampening the ringing.

Another solution is to put in a temporary support between the 2 legs that you cut out and file down later. Also it would help to use a heated chamber as the shrinkage is problematic with Taulman Bridge. The support would connect the legs and keep you from getting raised edges (that can get hit by the print head).