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You have a slipping X axis. Most likely the pulley on the X motor. Very easy to fix - you might have to remove the cover to get at that screw but most likely not. Whoever put your printer together seems to have left a few screws too loose. To clarify these are the "set" screws or "grub" screws embedded in each pulley. There are 6 pulleys on the X axis - you should tighten all 6 but the most likely pulleys are the 2 on the short belt and of those 2 the most likely one is the one on the motor. This guide talks about it: http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/23-a-visual-ultimaker-troubleshooting-guide

And of course ABS can be left in a car with the windows rolled up on a hot summer day. PLA can't. If it's hot enough to kill a human, it's probably hot enough to destroy a PLA print.

@3DGUY I believe you never answered Anon's very first question. How fast was the temp changing - was it something physically possible like 1 degree per second? Or was it an electrical problem where the temp might report 10 degree changes up or down in 1 second?

@uit and @spirit What you have done in effect warps the glass so that instead of the glass being flat it is now U shaped looking at it down the diagonal. This seems like a reasonable fix although it does put some tension on the glass. An alternate fix is to fix the actual problem which is that the top 4 corners of the UM2 are not flat - they are not in the same plane. These top 4 corners set the movement plane of the head as it moves around. If these 4 corners are not in a plane then you can't match the glass to the gantry without warping the glass into a U shape like you did. More specifically it's not the top 4 corners but the locations of the 8 bearings embedded into the walls of the machine - the 8 bearings that hold the 4 thicker rods in the gantry.

If the current from the extruder driver is too high or low it makes an awful sound. If the current is too high the stepper can get too hot (maybe the driver also). If the current is too low the extruder tends to skip steps on fast moves like when un-re-tracting. The way you fix the current amount is by turning the pot. Turning the tiny little pot to change the current is very sensitive. You can easily damage the driver. There is a test point very close to the pot (or you can usually probe the pot itself). The voltage at that test point controls the max current in a linear fashion where double the voltage is double the current. So you can monitor the voltage and increase/decrease by say 20% at a time and see if that fixes the noise. Keep in mind also that the extruder doesn't normally turn if the nozzle isn't above 180C but it's extremely easy to send the M override gcode to disable this feature if you are controlling the steppers manually through either the cura print window or even better through pronterface.

DSM is as simple and it's free but you have to learn it from scratch. It's quite different from sketchup. For one thing you can't create just a plane in space - you can only create solids.

Are you saying the rod can stick out the side of the printer? This is very easy to fix. It is held in place with a combination of black plastic spacers and the pulleys. One of the pulleys slipped so it must not be tight enough also. Now to your underextruded layers. It could certainly be a Z axis issue - on the gun grip it sure looks like the Z axis moved too much. Having underextruded layers however looks almost the same but that is a BIG skip there. What temperature, layer height and speed did you print at? Consider putting the filament on the floor - it can rub severely on the feeder unless you have the new feeder with the metal gromet. Even then it should work better with the filament on the floor. You may need to grease the z screw or oil the two Z rods. Consider sliding the bed up and down by hand with power off. See if there are sticky spots. There is a white teflon isolator that you can see if you look at the print head. The bottom of it touches the hot end. This part can get gradually worse over months of printing. You can often fix it by simply drilling it out with a 3mm drill. Or you can order (well you can get a free one from support I imagine) a new one if it is deformed enough that it is difficult to push a small piece of PLA through it. You are going to have to figure out if your problem is Z axis related or underextrusion related. Again what is your temp, layer height and printing speed?

Look at the model in sketchup. Is it just one square or are there lots of triangles on the bottom in the region that looks different? I suspect the later and that the printer is having trouble replicating the pattern on the bottom. Alternatively your feeder may have skipped backwards in that region. Or something on the glass such as the glue being thicker there. I love sketchup as I am so fast in it but I am learning DSM and it is much superior and doesn't create non-solid models like sketchup does. I am quite fast now in Design Spark Mechanical but I haven't memorized enough shortcut keys and such -- it's going to take me a year I think to be as fast as I am in sketchup. But DSM is worth learning well.

I forget the shrinkage of PLA from glass temp to room temp. It's either 2.5 to 3% or .25 to .3%. I guess it must be the latter (.25 to .3%). So maybe if you scaled everything in Cura (XY only - don't scale Z) that was to be printed in PLA by .3% (and double that for ABS) then that might fix some of the dimension issues. I don't know. It's more complicated as the lower layers are already cooled to room temp when you put the upper layers down and the upper layers are placed in the proper spot such that the lower layers hold them in place. Mostly. At least until they cool to glass temp. Once at glass temp both layers are "solid" but now the upper layer is still shrinking. No wonder you can see all the thin lines/layers in a print even at .1mm. What most people do is print everything twice. After printing it the first time measure all the dimensions and if a side is off by say .3mm then change the dimension of that side by .3mm to compensate.

The physics involved is amazingly complicated and beyond me even though I have thought on this subject hundreds of times. I only know solutions and causes of certain specific special cases in 3d printing. PLA and ABS have very different issues because of glass temp and shrinkage. First it's useful to know that both materials are printed at roughly the same temperature (say 200-260C). Then know that if you graph the density versus temperature both materials have mainly linear graphs. In other words they expand and shrink at about the same rate even passing through their phase transitions. Also the slope of these curves is about the same for both materials. What you might think? But ABS shrinks more! Not really - the big difference between the 2 materials is their glass temp. The glass temp for PLA is around 50-60C and ABS around 100C. This means that when cooling from glass temp to room temp, ABS shrinks twice as much. This means that the two materials have many differences caused by this single thing. ABS I would expect should deal with overhangs better and diameters of verticle holes (cylindrical holes) better because there is less shrinkage from print to glass temp than with PLA. So the rubber band effect that PLA has I would expect to be lessened by ABS. This means I would expect overhangs also to print much better but I haven't really compared them. But shrinkage *after* glass temp is achieved is much less (about half) with PLA so the entire part shrinks left and corner-lifting-forces aren't as strong.

By the way - look at the graph in this posting link below - the dark blue line - locate your printing temperature on the blue line and look up the .2mm max speed then print at half that speed if .2mm. If printing thinner layers you can print proportionately faster. So 50mm .1mm layer is same as 25mm/sec .2mm layer as far as volume of PLA is concerned. http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4127-um2-extrusion-rates-revisited/

It could be a little of that as well - you would expect two infill lines close together and then a gap. Then repeat that pattern. Which you see. But there is so much gap that most of the issue is underextrusion I think. At least if it is happening also on layer 2 then underextrusion. If it only happens on the top layers then maybe it's just not quite enough layers. Maybe make top/bottom thickness a little thicker. If you have play/backlash then in addition to this pattern of 2 then gap you would also expect to see diagonal infill not reaching the shell on 2 or more sides. Do you have this problem also?

Probably. If you multiple the layer height .2 times speed 50 times nozzle width .4 you get 4mm^3/sec. Some printers can reliably print up to 10 or even 12mm^3/sec at 230C but 5 or 6mm^3/sec at 230C is probably around the max I recommend. And at 220C that drops quite a bit - maybe only 3mm^3/sec. So you are near the upper end or at least within 2X of the upper end of print speed for this layer height and temperature. I recommend you either do thinner layers or slower speed or higher temp. 240C is a fine temp but I wouldn't go over that. Really best is to just slow down the print speed leaving layer height and tempt the same. Also possibly you aren't using the default of 2.85mm for filament size? Are you using 3mm in the PLA settings on the printer? Or 2.85mm?

I don't believe it. The layer view shows the exact path that the print head will make. It's kind of impossible for the print head to move to locations that aren't in the gcode. Note that after it finishes slicing it takes a while to fully load layer view graphics. You can see the % at the bottom of the screen although it is often covered by a message that you have to dismiss first. Then go through the layers slowly with the slider (shift up and down arrow). Check the layer where it printed a solid top.

I mean "slice it at different scales" and then look at it in layer view.

um original or um2? I printed a large version of this tower. In 3 pieces because I printed one about 16 inches tall (twice the height of the UM volume). It was the hardest print I ever did. I guess the first thing you need to decide is scale. Print it with different scales and look at the smallest parts and see which will be printed and which won't. The smallest thing is the railing at the top of the lower section of the tower. If you don't scale the tower up enough the supports won't be printed but the top of the railing *will* be printed in mid air. That's a problem. So pick a scale. As far as settings are concerned there was a lot of curling up of the overhang parts and the head was hitting the print pretty damn hard. I had to get the parts to stick to the bed very strongly such that I could lift the entire printer by one leg of the tower. Also it is extremely important to have the fan(s) at 100% to minimize curling. Also this part has mega retraction. So if you don't have zero stringing on your existing parts you might want to dial in your retraction settings. The retraction distance changes depending on how loose your bowden is - how much it wiggles up and down at the print head if you lift it. Also I used meshmixer supports. for the arches only. Very thick supports - I think 8mm diameter. With lots of branching. The bottom 3rd of the tower was the hardest part for me. It took 2 tries and second try it failed about 20 hours in due to a clogged nozzle and I was able to continue it the next day successfully.

When nothing was coming out of the nozzle, was the gear turning? Also when the extruder motor is on (during printing) it should be difficult (maybe impossible) to turn the large wood wheel. Double check your connections for the extruder stepper motor. Check that the stepper driver is installed (there are 5 slots and 4 obvious stepper drivers plugged in for x,y,z and e axes).

Feeder ticking is normal. Never print before checking on layer view. That would have shown filled in grill. To fix grill unchecked all fix horrible settings.

USB is not very reliable. 4 out of 4 times the connection times out right around when the head reaches goal temp. Consider setting temp to 0 in cura and reslice. Then in print window adjust temp to 210 and only when it reaches 210 start printing.

Video would be even better.

Something is wrong with your model. YOu have several choices. First - try checking "fix horrible A" and later B and see if that fixes the issue. If not there are 11 combinations of those that can fix it. Secondly, to fix it properly you could look at it in XRAY view. Anything the color red is a problem. Red indicates that a line passing through the model goes through an odd number of walls. Blue or white: even. Odd number of walls indicates an extra wall or a missing wall. There is an online service that can fix this model instantly and for free. I forget but I think it's netfabb online possibly?

Too many possibilities. You just have to inspect it carefully.

To me temp looks fine. The pyramid might not be able to get much better although there are tricks to make the top much better. But the vase you should be able to make much better. I can't decide if it's stringing or if it's just printing too fast. I would look in layer view and see if there are lots of horizontal blue lines (non extruding moves) in the region where those bumps are on the vase. If "yes" then make sure retration is enabled (there will also be vertical blue lines if retraction is working) and if it is happening but still getting bumps then maybe increase retraction distance (default is 4.5mm but many people's bowden jiggles a bit and this is fixable) to 5.5mm? If "no" then try printing at half the speed. You have to be extra patient if you want extra quality. In general quality is maximized at 20mm/sec so no reason to go slower than that. I usually print at 35mm/sec for high quality and 50-100mm/sec for low quality.

I think there might be a third announcement unrelated to things for sale. But still good news.

Nothing in London. You must mean 3d printshow: http://3dprintshow.com/ Here is a list (scroll past the map) of upcoming makerfairs: http://makerfaire.com/map/