gr5

voted.

I have a second UM2 nozzle. I had someone drill it out to .7mm for me. Joris himself has a larger nozzle diameter - I forget but I think .8mm maybe.

1mm? I hope you mean .1mm! Did you do the math? All you have to do is multiply those 3 numbers together. Why do people have so much trouble with simple math? Okay so .1 * 80 * .8 is 6.4mm^3/sec. That's faster than any print I've ever done. Except test prints. And you already demonstrated that you can't print over 4mm^3/sec at 230C so there's your problem. I recommend you do 40mm/sec and you should be fine. 6mm^3/sec is kind of fast for anything you want to be "okay" quality. Much too fast for high quality prints. EldRick has had problems printing at 220C and hotter but I have been fine. 220C is my most common printing temp and I commonly go up to 240C. I think that the temperatures for different printers vary more than I initially assumed.

1) You never answered the question about what your shell thickness was. Also what was layer height and print speed? 2) Please update your profile settings to indicate your country - it matters for support issues - under "location". Please also indicate in profile settings that you have a "UM2". 3) You can calculate mm^3/sec by multiplying 3 numbers together: layer height, print speed, nozzle width (.4mm) although in spiralize mode use shell thickness instead. 4) 4mm^3/s at 230C is indeed a somewhat faulty machine. It means you have to print at about half the speed that a good working machine is capable of. There are about 10 well known possible causes. Also recently there have been several faulty temperature probes so I would start there - these probes read 20 to 30C hotter (at 220C) than reality so you may be printing much cooler than you think. Try setting the nozzle temp to 110C. Wait a full minute then put a drop of water on the tip of the nozzle with your finger. It should quietly sizzle. If you look at it closely you should see tiny bubbles furiously boiling inside. Faulty machines won't do this until around 140C.

Announcement will be september 18 so put that date on your calendars. And check the UM web page or search for tweets with hashtag ultimaker2: #ultimaker2 On twitter. I'll try to remember to post some photo tweets there as I'll be there. And I have a cell phone.

I always recommend .3mm bottom layer for new people because the thicker the bottom layer, the less accurate you need to get a nice print. But if you want ABSOLUTELY PERFECT bottom then you need to level not just to accuracy of paper but 1/10 that and you need to do .1mm first layer. Print nice and slow and have the bed nice and warm (>40C e.g. 50C). You will have to tweak those screws many times to get it perfect. Forget the levelling procedure - that just gets you close. To get it perfect you have to play with the screws alone while doing skirts or bottom layers and getting it perfect. But you can get pretty damn close with .3mm bottom layer if you have leveled it properly.

Lol!!! Love the video! Are you the guy in black (up where it's safer) with the controller? I thought it was going to be some massive amount of editing with music and stuff because it took so long to post, lol! Seriously - thanks for posting that video. I think I watched it 10 times.

lol. No I'm certain that hasn't happened.

Yes - either use cool head lift or print two (or more!) of these at the same time. Cool head lift will offer a great improvement but still you will get some strings while it does it's thing. printing two will give you none of the melting issues but now you will have stringing between the 2 parts if your retraction settings aren't dialed in. Although for me 220C, 35mm/sec should come out extraodinarily nice but you can cool it down more and slow it down more. No need to go below 20mm/sec even at 190C.

It's "the google". Google knows everything. I have had to reduce qty of faces (had over 10 million on this crazy thingiverse scanned image) and so I had to google around and it worked so well I saved the link in my "ultimaker tips" file.

The top surface shows 2 issues: underextrusion and play. Play: This is trivial to fix. Play (aka backlash) can be caused by loose belts or by too much friction. In either case when one of the servos (can't tell if it's X or Y from the picture) moves to a certain position, the head doesn't quite make it all the way there and stops a bit early. Since you have a new UM2 it's probably not friction but you can turn off power and push the head around and make sure both axes are about the same. More likely you have a loose belt. The long belts have spring tighteners so it's probably not those but check those first - squeeze all 4 long belts and make sure they are all equally tight. Most likely the problem is one of the short belts. To tighten, loosen the for screws that hold the motor in place, then push down on the motor hard with one hand (like maybe 2kg force) while tightening the 4 screws (they are in slots so you can slide the motor up and down a bit). Then feel the tightness of the short belts. Underextrusion: Not enough plastic coming out on that top layer. I don't see underextrusion on your side layers. It could be simply you need one more layer - you want at least 3, maybe 4 layers to get a good seal on the top of your part. The first layer comes out a little low and it takes a few layers until it's all at the right height. So top/botttom thickness should be 4X your layer height. If layer height is .1mm then top/bottom should be at least .4. If .2 then .8. Other fixes for underextrusion are printing hotter or slower (you may be approaching the limit of the volume of filament it can squirt through that tiny nozzle hole). Hotter to make the plastic thinner (less viscous - more like honey than toothpaste) slower to lower the pressures and forces involved.

What is your shell thickness? In "spiralize" (joris mode) if you ask for a .8mm (for example) shell it overextrudes 2X so that you get a .8mm wall with a .4mm nozzle. This is difficult to do so you have to print slower. Also what is your layer height. .2mm is double the flow as .1mm. Anyway I would try raising the temp to 240C if you are skipping steps. Or lowering the sped of course. Here is a test you can do to see if your printer is "normal" or defective. You must do the test at 230C for the test to have meaning. Anything below 6mm^3/sec I would consider failing. 8^3mm/sec and faster is a pass: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4586-can-your-um2-printer-achieve-10mm3s-test-it-here/

Thinking back on this it doesn't make sense. But it works. I usually just assume it's off by 25.4 and scale up or down accordingly but once it was off by 1000 (meters versus mm).

This should really be a CAD feature in my opinion. Please provide a screen shot of any bugs in Cura regarding missing controls. When I have a part scaled wrongly and it's too big I just scale by .03937 - I don't even think about it. I just *assume* the model is scaled in inches instead of mm. This works 90% of the time. Maybe 100%. If it's too small it's probably in meters so I scale up by 1000X. I think these 2 scalings have been the ONLY scalings ever needed. Ever. For a gazillion prints (okay for hundreds anyway).

To get extra good quality with this print I recommend printing it slow and cool. Make sure retraction is turned on - some of the quick print settings turn off retraction. It's a checkbox. I don't use quick print. Pretty much no one does. I don't recommend it. So try 210C and 30mm/sec with retraction on. Make sure shell thickness is a multiple of nozzle diameter. So .8mm is good. .2mm layers is good and .1mm layers is even better quality (but takes twice as long). If you want even better quality try 20mm/sec and maybe 200C and .1mm layers. It will take a very long time to print but you will get exceptional quality. Here is some information about stringing: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/

This is fine but I don't think you really need it that thick. You will save lots of time if you print 1.2mm thick. The faster you go with this the better the quality. I recommend at least 150mm/sec. Maybe 250mm/sec. This reduces stringing by pulling the string so that it breaks. I'm still not sure what is going on with your print. The picture is blurry. But I think I see small bumps. You need to know exactly what is going on right where the bump is. Is this a point of retraction/stringing? Or is this something else? Is this where the printer slows down or stalls? Is this overextrusion leakage? Maybe your filament diameter or flow is set so that you are overextruding? I really don't know. I think you should be able to match each bump to something in the slice view. This will help us figure out what the problem is. Also you might want to try a different filament. Different filaments print amazingly different quality results.

Detailed instructions here: http://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/polygon_reduction_with_meshlab

spider robot? There are people building one at a maker space near where I live. It's a bit scary. Here is video of one leg: Here's their kickstarter video which was funded a while ago: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/projecthexapod/stompy-the-giant-rideable-walking-robot-0/widget/video.html

I think you should skip the topic or keep it under 15 minutes and spend most of it letting people walk around and chat. Or maybe just have an open questions and answers session where people can ask anything about 3d printing or Ultimaker company (you don't have to answer everything). But in my experience the best part of these meetings is to meet the other people at the meeting. This gives everyone a sense of community - that they are part of something larger - and makes new connections and forms new ideas. Everyone has different ideas and abilities and these people meet at these meetings and wonder things/projects/businesses/artwork are born.

That's a pretty mild overhang. You should try .1mm layer height. I think you are getting that because your layer height is so thin. I can print up to about 45 degrees from vertical with the same quality as vertical. Much steeper and the quality slowly starts to degrade until it looks horrible at 80 degrees from vertical (but good enough for practical parts - just not good enough for artwork). The pattern you see on overhangs in your picture is closer to the pattern I'm used to seeing on underextrusion. But I suspect it is not underextrusion (it might be) and instead I think it's a combination of overhang with extra thin layer height. You could try an intermediate layer thickness, say .05mm or .08mm. There is a layer height that achieves the best quality surface. I'm not sure where the top of the quality curve is. .2mm is definitely worse quality than .1mm. And .05mm I think is worse than .1mm (many will disagree). I'm not sure where the best quality point is. I think the problem is that with .02mm layers the amount of plastic coming out of the nozzle is so tiny that you have surface tension issues.

This happened to my UM2 almost exactly a year ago and it's been working fine since. The steppers are strong but weak enough so that the machine shouldn't be damaged. The same goes for UM Original. We are talking about X,Y axes here. I can't speak for the Z axis.

You can get black PA6 nylon here. I've printed with the White version (quite a few parts) if you have any questions. It's pretty easy to print on the UM2 but you need to print quite hot (260C): http://fbrc8.com/products/pa6-nylon-filament It's more flexible than PLA but stiffer than for example taulman bridge (haven't tried other taulman products).

It won't damage your printer but it turns your repeatability to hell. Definitely fix this. The problem, as Nallath says, is you aren't triggering one of the endstops. With power off push the head around and into that corner (one axis at a time) and listen for the faint click when the endstop is triggered. See if one of the axes isn't triggering. It could be one of your thin metal rods that pass through the head isn't sticking out far enough on the side to hit the endstop. It could be your endstop moved. It could be the fan shroud is no longer symmetrical and that is hitting. It could be lots of minor mechanical things. If you can't figure out what changed you could just bend the metal arm of the endstop so that it gets triggered sooner.

See first photo here: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/ Yes, lower temps helps stringing. Also you want very fast "travel speed" and if you are relying on using feedrate % to lower speed you are unfortunately also lowering travel speed. So maybe you should lower your mm/sec in Cura some instead. Also your retraction distance might not be enough but it sounds like you solved this anyway.

Looks good. 3 things: 1) The bottom layer looks too thin - that brim should be thicker. Is your bottom layer height .3mm? Or .1mm? Or what? I think you are leveled with the nozzle too close to glass by a tiny bit. Maybe tighten the 3 screws by 1/4 turn. 2) To fix that stringing junk lower temperature but you may also have to lower speed: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/ 3) What city is that? What country do you live in? Is that the brooklyn bridge? Are you going to MakerfaireNYC? http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/6815-makerfaire-nyc-2014/