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How do you change filament? Standard way or heating up and pulling the filament out? Standard way until about month ago. Now I heat up to 90C, pull damn hard with my hand and hand insert the new piece. I haven't used "change filament" in a while. Do you "sharpen" the filament tip so it doesn't get hung up inside the teflon piece? Now I have to as inserting by hand is a pain. I almost always cut the pla to a nice tip. Partly to discard the old tip. How often do you change filament? Every other print or so. I'm always changing colors. Do you let the nozzle heated up for a long time? Never. I'm afraid to let it stay hot very long at all. 240C is my max temp for the most part. Do you perform _very_ long prints? I've done 3 prints > 12 hours. One was about 30 hours. Room temperature where the printer is stored. UM says 20C. I have AC in summer, heat in winter. Never gets very humid. UM2 in the fall so haven't run AC yet. Wich filament do you use (spool, loose, brand)? Mostly UM but also printbl. I have had some underextrusion on spools down to the last 1/4. I now only run those spools on the UM original. Did you change motion settings? no. Did you increase stepper motor current? no. Do you use an alternative feeder? no. Haven't taken mine off yet or looked inside yet. Do you have a filament dust filter? Not really. Tried it - was a mess. Have you took the electronics cover off and checked where the extruder motor wires are guided? (maybe if they are guided wrong and are too close to other componentes, the extruder motor might be influenced during prints). My cover has been off for a very long time. The one thing I do that not many do - and I think it's important - I always print with filament on the floor. I think the feeder is too low and/or the filament spool too high and that creates a 45 degree angle as the filament enters the feeder. Other things: I've had many tangle problems. Now when I remove filament I hang on to the end and tuck it through a spool hole so it can't get tangled. I can't print 10mm^3/sec usually but I rarely need to go that fast - I mean I can print the cylinder to 10mm^3 but it isn't dependable - not safe. I feel comfortable printing 3mm^3/sec at 230C. I have 2 printers and I've never been able to keep them both going. So I'm really not in a rush, so I tend to print slow. When I push it to 5m^3/sec I'm bound to get a single ugly underextruded layer. I love the atomic bob method and so basically do it on all filament changes now. I have had at least 2 nozzle clogs that needed combination of atomic method and sometimes also some hypodermic needle.

Well fuh and I both lowered our spools and both had improved results. I have too many other tests in mind right now to do this one. Right now I'm experimenting with slicers and thin walls.

@andrew white - what country are you in and also please update your profile settings to indicate that country in your location field. The answer to your question depends on what country you are in as there are dozens (hundreds?) of suppliers of PLA alone.

So sumnivent, take a picture of the print head also so we can see where the bowden tube ends.

Yeah - what I was going to say. Also make sure retraction is enabled in Cura. Change retraction distance from 4.5mm to 5.5mm. Retraction distance is not in Cura - it's on the printer itself. Or maybe more. Why should Daid weigh in? He already did in a posting up above - maybe you missed it. #7. That stringing you got shouldn't be too hard to remove. But if you want even better quality print 2 robots side by side at the same time. This helps a lot. That's how I did this one:

I think this sounds great at first but sometimes other things need to be considered. If the switch is broken and shorted it will always report closed so step 1 may be an infinite loop plus you might break the glass. 7mm is a good compromise.

You should be able to get 50 micron XYZ no problem with resin technology (form1, b9creator, titan). But not with FDM (heated plastic). Plus my understanding is you can use these resins for lost casting technology which is what you want. You really really should look into form1 or b9creator. These are amazing machines although the resin expensive. http://b9creator.com/ I just looked at the above page and there are several sliding "pictures" at the top and one of them talks about investment casting and even mentions metal casting and jewelry.

lol. So the last guy I said it probably wan't the belts but it was. Well now on these above images of gray parts I think it *is* the belts. Usually the short belts meaning if this is a UM1 just slide the motors down a little tighter. Also you have a little bit of underextrusion - what print speed, layer height and temp are you using? You might need to either raise the temp or lower the print speed or print thinner layers. 240C is a relatively safe upper limit for PLA so if you are printing cooler than 240C try raising the temp 10 or 15C. If you are already at 240C try cutting back the speed by 30-50% just for kicks so you can see some quality improvements - or maybe you don't care.

@suminvent - please post pictures. What you see as underextrusion could be something else. It could be a fan/temp issue. It could be a bad nozzle (deformed nozzle due to damage). It could be the bent tube. It could be a lot of things. I doubt it's leveling unless it only happens on the bottom layer. Oil will not make any noticable difference to your print other than allow the material through the tube better. Plastics are made from oil by the way. To post pictures: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4525-how-to-upload-an-image-to-the-forum/

Yes. That's a common problem. It seems to vary depending on the exchange rates and maybe sometimes customs misses certain items but it seems like about 1/3 of the people in USA have to do this. Should be in the $100 to $200 cost range. They won't release it until you pay.

I printed a knob for something outdoors. It has not changed color in a year now. If you google "pla outdoor" I think you will find other people who have done better experiments and you will find that PLA does very well outdoors. Better than ABS I think.

UM Original or UM2? The UM2 shouldn't grind most filaments as it has a lower current applied to the feeder so that it will slip backwards instead of grind. And did you have mega retraction? If um2, count the M11 commands in the gcode and look at the final extrusion position in mm and see how many retractions you had per mm. I've done 8 and was fine (same filament went back and forth through feeder 8 times. On average meaning sometimes more than that). On UM1 in general you can raise temp or lower speed to get less forces, less pressure in the head, which reduces grinding.

That sounds great but should I do that now or wait until steve finishes with combining?

People are going to say "tighten your belts" and that could be it but I don't think so as your infill is touching the borders very nicely. When that hole is printed, the printer is squirting out a thin line of plastic that has a tendency to cool fast and shrink just a little and start to act like a rubber band for a second before it freezes. In that moment - after it leaves the nozzle, but before it turns solid it is pulling and thinning and it tends to pull off the layer below a bit towards the center of the circle a tiny bit. Also it is pulling on the layer below trying to get *that* layer to also shrink a bit. The reason the shape is different has to do with the cura slicing changes which has the circle start in a different location. There's nothing wrong with Cura - it's just that it starts the circle at a different spot. The fix is generally more fan, longer layer time, lower temperatures, slower printing. In that order of importance. So: 1) make sure fan is 100%. Make sure it is blowing and not sucking. consider adding a second fan (a table fan?). 2) make sure layer time is at least 7 seconds if you want this to come out nice. This makes it so that the layer below has more time to cool before the layer above is applied. 3) If you have a UM2, keep the temp no higher than 60C for PLA. I would try 50C even (lower than 40C and you start to get danger of parts not sticking as well). Also lowering nozzle temp to 200 or 190C might help. 4) Printing at 20-30mm/sec might help also as it's possible this is an overextrusion issue on speed changes and printing slower can help that.

Someone else is teaching a modeling class where they print out the models as part of the class. It doesn't say but I know the guy and he likes solidworks so I assume that's the software. They design and then create bottle openers that require a coin to function: http://www.theprintingbay.org/#classes

Yes. Here is what the latest UM1 looks like: http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Ultimaker_rev.4_assembly:_Extrusion_head Ask the seller to send a photo of the head and the feeder as those 2 things have had the most upgrades. Also the UM1 doesn't necessarily come with the Ulticontroller but that is extremely useful and will set you out another bit of money - 200 euros maybe? Look on the Ultimaker.com shop.

Well laser toner comes in multicolors and maybe anon has some extra that he hasn't thrown out yet.

30,000 volts and 40 Watt (not milliwatt!!!!) laser? This seems a bit dangerous. Not to mention the powder. I can't imagine a company like Ultimaker selling these things.

@mairem - there you go again posting questions here. 5 days ago. Again, I only check here once per week or so. It's really not a good place for questions. GLUE, FILLER, PRIMER Everyone says "super glue" aka cyanoacrilic glues work great on PLA. I've tried it also and it works well for me. As for filling people have said "bondo" works well - it's normally used to fill dent's in car doors - my carpenter uses it - I've used it to fill wood holes. It's easy to sand and easy to paint. While at the automotive store buying bondo - pick up some "automotive primer". On the spray can it should say that it is good for "plastic" and "metal". This is a fantastic primer and you can paint with any kind of paint on top (ceramic, latex, oil based, anything).

My um2 fan is hard to hear. I was testing the fan noise again yesterday. I can hear it if I turn my head and point one ear towards it at about 1 meter. If I am facing the machine I can't hear the fan until about 1/2 meter distance. It is quieter than all the laptops and computers in my house. We have 4 laptops and 2 desktops used on a daily basis. My primary computer (this one) I can hear out to about 4 meters if facing it. Farther if I turn my head.

Yes- it might be that you need to raise the bed closer to the nozzle by a very small amount. But this also is how it looks if your short belts are a little loose - you might want to slide the X and Y stepper motors down a small amount. The vertical axis in the photo looks much worse than the horizontal axis in the photo. I think that's because of a bug in the "infill overlap" feature in Cura. By the way - what did you set infill overlap to? It should be around 15% normally. The blob problem *inside* the infill - why do you care? If you get blobs on surfaces one simple fix is to slow down to closer to the jerk speed. Jerk speed is 20mm/sec so try 20-35mm/sec and see if that helps blobs. Blobs are caused by many things - the most common two things are: 1) very high polygon count - Marlin can only plan 10 or 20 moves ahead so it needs to decelerate to half of jerk speed (10mm/sec) if the next 20 line segments are all in the next 3mm or so. Changing speeds often causes blobbing. 2) Different infill speed than shell speed. Slowing down to 30mm/sec is only one way but a simple way to fix most blob issues.

You can disable this by going to "tools" and choosing "print all at once". Don't know why you can't slice. Try .4mm layers just for kicks to see if that helps as it slices much faster when layers are thicker. There is a log file somewhere that might show what the problem is.

Another quick test to see if you have the leveling bug - turn off power, push the bed all the way down until it stops. Then twist the Z screw and count how many clicks you feel until you hear the Z level switch click off. I get 16 or 17. Take that result and divide by 6.25 and that's how many mm that distance is. If that distance is > 3mm then you have a leveling problem (won't be repeatable). If you get 19 or more, then fix by bending the Z limit switch arm slightly.

Oh yeah baby! Printer porn! It's beautiful! It's perfect!

That's impressive - you should get really good results that way. I think you're going to want the new heated bed when it goes for sale - it's much stiffer and more consistent (made from steel) and flatter (glass).