gr5

You start out with a hypothesis about ABS versus PLA and then conclude something about layer heights? This is confusing. What have you found ABS has trouble with more specifically? Bridging? Overhangs? Lifting Corners? Ugly surfaces? Clogging? Underextrusion? Uneven extrusion? I haven't done much with ABS but 245C and zero fan has worked well for me so far. Bed at 110C. Hairspray on the glass. Use brim. But to cover the front of a UM2 all you need is some plastic wrap. No permanent modification necessary and it only takes a few minutes. And to cover the top all you need is a box of the right size.

I believe all the necessary build steps are somewhere on this forum. Use google search (the search built into this forum sucks) and restrict to this forum by adding to your search string "site:umforum.ultimaker.com". Also included the word "daid" as he is the author and he is the one who explained how to build it. There's the python portion of cura and the steam engine portion. If you only want to change the gui - can't you just edit the python files? I don't think they are compiled. Or is it the c code you want to edit?

Don't know. Is there lots of grease on your Z screw? There should be - if you touch it you should get lots on your hands.

The UM Original kit is much cheaper than the UM2 and prints about the same as long as you don't print ABS (you need heated bed for ABS). Makerbot deletes forum posts that criticize the company. UM does not. Makerbot patents designs created on their forum. UM is open source. Makerbot printers are black. UM printers are white.

Yes. Get rid of all overhangs. Seriously, I'm just going to say the same thing as mnis. Shell thickness .8mm. print speed 20mm/sec if you really want god like perfection but 35mm/sec should improve what you see. Lower your print temp by another 10C or try 200C. Fans must be 100% by the time the overhang starts which is, um, layer zero. Bed is much too hot and causing that curve in the bottom 3mm of your part - that is fixed by lowering bed temp to 60C or even 50C. 60C should be fine. Increase minimum layer time a little like dimensioneer says. With fans at 100% at layer 0 you may have trouble getting the PLA to stick so actually you should print the first layer hot (240C) and then cool to 200C gradually so it doesn't overshoot to 190C (set to 210C and then wait for it to overshoot to 200-205C or so then set to 200C).

Please post pictures. The printer probably slowed down for the letters and then speed up for a straight away and it takes a bit of time for the extruder to get the nozzle pressure back up to fast printing speeds so you can get underextrusion. You could print slower so that it never slows down for the letters. But really I need to see the picture of what you are talking about.

No math. I just told the extruder to extrude into thin air faster and faster until the stepper started skipping. Unfortunately this doesn't account for additonal pressure of having the nozzle partly blocked .2mm away by the part being printed. So I repeated the test during a real print here: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4127-um2-extrusion-rates-revisited/ And got slightly lower values for max print speed. You should cut the values in this table in half anyway. Seems like a lot of work. If you are running a business and have 10 printers going all day then maybe. But some steppers seem to be stronger than others plus you might have a 10% nozzle clog yet it prints fine but your max speed is lower because of this so really it's going to vary a lot. I just take the max speed from my tests and cut it by 2X or more. Part of the purpose of this graph is so that people understand that raising the temp by 10C might make their underextrusion problem go away. Or lowering by 10C might cause other problems if they don't slow it down a bit. Also some people claimed the um2 extrusion was worse than the um original (it is for some people but for most printers it's about the same). Also when people post that they printed something at 60mm/sec .2mm layers at 200C and wonder why there is holes in the side I refer them to this graph and show how they are trying to print faster than this graph says you can. They might say "but I printed 75mm/sec just fine before" and I'll say "not at 200C, .2mm layers you didn't".

This is already being done. For North America. The main issue here is the price of the nozzle. I suspect the current supplier is charging a lot as the nozzle is a bit complicated. Plus you need a decent markup on some things as paying lots of people to do customer support - the money has to come from somewhere. I think this is mostly UM growing pains.

If the model is bigger than the print bed it turns gray. You have to make the model smaller, or tell cura you have a larger bed or remove skirt and brim settings.

Eldrick, also note that if you posted this rant on any other company's forum your post would be deleted. Now that's "open"! That right there tells me UM is a great company to buy stuff from. I mean it's great to be able to complain about the price of a part on a UM2 openly on their own forum. And UM employees are kind of agreeing with you even. That's so awesome! That would never happen with makerbot. They would delete your post and ban you from the forum. And the cool thing is that because the part is open source, if there is high demand, someone will start selling these nozzles. Already you can buy nozzle kits for UM1. You can by a set of 7 nozzles for about $100. Some day you will be able to do that for the UM2.

You may have mechanical issues with your printer but it would be good just to do a test at 24%. Just to see what happens. It might make no difference. But it will give us all clues as to what's going wrong. I have no problems at any infill from 0% to 100%. It just works. But there *is* a huge transition between 24 and 25% where it's a different pattern. I usually print at 24% or less. I'd love to see pictures of the sides to see if you have underextrustion there. Also note that you can have a different infill speed than outer shell speed. You might want to set that to 0 so the speeds are the same. If you only post once every 3 weeks this will take a while to figure out.

Maybe. Or maybe he'll just hire more people?

Garry don't listen to him. I still think you can get it for free. What country are you in? Well I hope you got an open source alternative like lulzbot or printrbot. You think UM is bad but at least they don't steal ideas from their customers and patent them and a million other nasty things. Open Source is worth a lot of money to me. It means the community keeps improving. This whole pricing of the nozzle thing is a temporary glitch (I hope). I mean they were giving them away for free for a while until they finally picked a price. Now I think they over compensated. You just happened to hit it at the peak price. This is an expensive part to make (the nozzle).

I think this high price for this nozzle is temporary. I hope. But keep in mind that this is an open source printer and you can order the part yourself. It's quite complicated - unlike the nozzles on the UM Original. Having said all this I know that UM was giving these out for free for a while and now it sounds like they are over charging. Eventually I suspect they will find a reasonable price in between. Note that for upgrading ones machine to a new capability (second extruder or having a second nozzle with a different diameter) $100 seems reasonable. I get a whole new capability (e.g. .7mm diameter printing! More than twice as fast!) But if I broke my nozzle and wanted this small part replaced then $100 seems expensive.

If you blow up a driver they are very inexpensive to replace. Google "pololu" for replacements.

So your UM Original should have come with an arduino. Did it not? Anyway if you want to keep going, install pronterface and move a few steppers (post #14 above).

You might want to continue printing with older Cura. The nice thing about Cura is each version is a completely different application so you can install many versions. However you can get a few more features in your print window if you go to "file" "preferences" and choose "pronterface" instead of "basic". People are writing better plugins but it may take a while. There are some other interfaces here on the forum somewhere.

Don't feel bad. I couldn't figure it out either until I read about it. But afterwards it's obvious. I mean what is that clip for if not to hold up something. And after removing the clip maybe I should un-hold-it-up. Should be obvious but it wasn't.

Nice. Daid will love you after that. I don't think ultimaker has the ability to sell or charge for parts unless they are part of the whole ordering system. And there are almost zero parts in there.

Please don't use imgur as I don't think it will hold the picture for decades like UM will. Instead click "forum" on the top left of this page and click "upload". Later make a post and click "my media".

You can't wait one hour for suggestions? Jeez. That *is* a good kit though. For now you can put a cardboard box on the top and saran wrap on the sides. Once you get the heated bed.

Oh - I don't recommend that. It's best to have an understanding of what you are doing. Either think (Hmm - what speed did he use - did he use infill? What shell thickness?) and then check that, or you can instead go through each parameter one at a time and see if anything stands out as being different from what you chose. When you have only done one or two prints it seems like a lot of parameters in cura but when you've done 30 you think - why are there so few options and parameters in Cura? It doesn't take long to learn them all.

These are very nice. And super easy to print: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:240158

Congrats ian.

Good point - that's a 3rd reason something in your STL file might not slice.