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Because of the brim below. The brim and support on the same spot - well it doesn't work - it's basically a Cura bug. You could turn off brim. But I would instead model 8 1mm diameter supports for the 4 outer and 4 inner corners and let the UM2 bridge the rest.

Looks like black ABS from the feeder. If you take the feeder apart I think you will see it is getting ground up. Consider building a filament holder on the floor. I spent 10 minutes and used spare chunks of wood for this one:

Will imgur host your pictures for years and years? Or just a few months? It's probably better if you load your pictures into the forum so that they will last "forever" or at least a few years. Click "gallery" on the top left of this page, then click the "upload" blue button. Then when you make a posting click "my media" next to the smiley face.

The two thinner wires (white/brown) are for the temp sensor. The two thicker wires supply the power for heat. Double check both of those thinner screws since your problem with the temp sensor is likely either the screws or the solder connection form the connector to the board.

Daid is just providing information that there are better stepper drivers out there that are quieter. I believe Eric Zalm is working on a whole new Marlin with all new hardware. Possibly including these newer steppers. He doesn't work for Ultimaker as this is probably more for the reprap community but I'm sure UM will jump on this as soon as it's "product worthy". In other words, a few reprap people will get it first, but eventually maybe it will be in the UM3D or maybe a UM Original PCB upgrade or UM2 upgrade. Who knows! If you really need to know what the status is you should talk to him, not UM.

Yes. Exactly. After printing the first layer (or the whole part) if you pull it off and look at the bottom layers carefully and there are thick gaps between the infill pattern then less of the part is touching the glass and so it will stick (half?) as well. If the volume of air in the gaps is say 20% of the volume of a stripe then you are probably levelling the plate 20% too far away as a percentage of the first layer height. So if you bottom layer height is .3mm and gaps are 20% then you should get closer to the glass by .06mm. This isn't how I measure it. Usually I just use the paper, use a thick first layer (.3mm or at least .2mm) and it usually works out fine. If it is something very critical due to strong lifting forces I always use brim and make sure there are no gaps in the brim and if there are I abort the print and re-level. If you are too close to the bed then the extruder tends to click a lot. Usually I don't care but sometimes I abort and re-level. Once you get levelling close enough it tends to stay good for many weeks.

By the way - an extreme hack fix would be to stretch the robot vertically by 2X in cura "scale" feature, print with .4mm layers and set flow to 50%. LOL!

Easy fix! This is usually caused by the Z stepper jumper being wrong. I even still have a picture in my gallery of it Click on the image above and look at the red circled part carefully. You want yours like that. The right most jumper should be either removed or placed as shown in the picture so that it does nothing (connects the pin to thin air). I suspect your right most connector is in place like the 2 next to it.

I couldn't see the picture. It wants me to create an account on the fencing site. When I got to the part where it wanted my email I gave up. I would expect solid infill layers to shrink *more*, not less. I'm wondering if there is a different issue - maybe related to a heated bed or fan issue as I've seen that cause what looks like shrinking but is something more complicated. To post a picture click on GALLERY in the top left corner of this page. Then click the blue UPLOAD button. After uploading make a new post and click "My Media" next to the smiley face.

You can buy a new piece of glass - it is ordinary glass except that it is very thick - so it should be very cheap - probably only 10 euros. Any glass store will custom make this for you - they do this kind of thing many times per day.

Oui, l'axe Z est fort.

I'm going to be helping out at the local high school "science and technology expo" in 2 weeks. I'll be doing planetarium shows all day in a portable planetarium (I have done over 250 of them over the last 15 years). But also at the expo I will be loaning them my 2 Ultimakers (an Original and a "2") and they will be printing for 4 hours. I can't be at the booth so I need it to run very smoothly. I will be training someone this weekend. Anyway I spent all last Saturday redesigning the "stretchlet". I didn't like how the letters came out for the one created on thingiverse and the design that ultimaker uses is much more comfortable than most (it has no sharp corners that touch your skin) so I ended up doing the whole damn stretchlet from scratch using sketchup (designspark doesn't do text). Took me 10 iterations (I have the 10 reject bracelets to prove it) but now I have the perfect stretchlet/bracelet for the expo. Sander gave me the code that UM uses to make stretchlets and I stole the code they use to knock one off and print another. I printed 25 stretchlets unattended and they came out perfect. Now if you simply turn on my UM Original it heats up and starts printing stretchlets. No need to grab the PLA with tweezers - I made my own custom wipe with gcode. Sunday I spent all day in CAD re-inventing the local high school with all its false fronts and overhangs and details and Sunday night printed a replica of the HS. Will be printing that on the UM2 during the Expo (with a completed one nearby). That was my weekend!

Daid maybe you already do this but it would be nice to add comments in the gcode where bridging is occurring in case someone wants to experiment with a plug in like: over extrude or decrease speed, or increase speed, or over extrude for the first mm, then underextrude the rest, or change acceleration, or whatever.

Here's what I would do with the 3mm filament. Take some sheet metal and drill a 3mm hole through it. Then feed all the 3mm filament through it and see how many times it gets stuck. Then throw all your 3mm filament away. Or you can skip to the final step and save yourself some time. At some point you are going to throw it all away. It's just a question of how long it takes you to admit defeat.

Your issue is with the Y axis - motor is in back left corner. If it leans forward in sudden steps occasionally it is usually a loose set-screw inside one of the 6 pulleys for that axis (yes six! check the two on the short belt the hardest of which to get to is on the motor shaft). If it leans forward more gradually where every layer is missing just a few steps, then the problem can also be set-screw but more likely it is caused by a rubbing short-belt. While it is printing look to see if the short belt twists back and forth each time Y changes direction. If so it is rubbing. Move the pulley on the Y stepper closer to the motor - You have to take the corner cover off (just one screw), then remove the 4 screws that hold the Y stepper, lower the bed just below the Y motor so you can rest the Y motor on it and not pull too hard on the wires. Look at the distance from the pulley to the motor - you might have to slide it even closer - about 1/2mm from motor is usually good. Alternatively you could add 4 washers under the motor standoffs so the motor is another mm or so away from the wall. I'm not sure if the screws are long enough to handle another mm distance but probably will be okay. Also look for black dust under the Y motor indicating a rubbing short belt. Also push the head around with power off to see if Y axis seems to have higher resistance.

Nope. There are 3 causes but in fact the slicer path will be .4mm larger in diameter than what CAD shows to compensate for the radius of the nozzle of .2mm on each side. The causes: 1) Shrinkage as people said. It sounds like you adjusted your steps/mm to account for this so it probably is not an issue in your case. Having infill does *not* prevent shrinkage - if anything it encourages it, pulling the sides inward. 2) segments in a circle. If you print a circle with 4 segments the cad software is cutting through the circle severely. The more segments the closer you are to a circle but even with 20 segments you are cutting into the circle a bit. So unless you have 100 segments you will probably see some minor "cutting in" due to that factor. 3) viscoscity and stickyness and pulling inward by the nozzle. The PLA while it comes out as a string is getting pulled towards the center of the circle as the nozzle goes around the edge. This places the PLA more inward than desired. This effect is stronger on smaller circles (pulls in more towards the center). It seems like the slicer could do some kind of "pulling in" compensation which might change for different types of PLA, nozzle temp, fan speed. The factor would somehow get stronger for small circles and weaker for larger ones. Most people however just print critical dimensions twice. The first time for practice, then update your cad model to compensate and print again. After a while you can build up a set of rules of how much to compensate for your typical printer settings.

If you set shell thickness to less than nozzle width then it purposefully underextrudes. This is acceptable down to about 75% (shell 0.3mm) anything lower and you get ugly underextrusion and weak layers. And holes.

I think UM2 XY is quieter because of the mounting and because of the material used. Wood makes for a great sounds board - think violin, guitar.

That sounds wrong. That sounds like pillowing. Pillowing can usually be fixed with more layers. Please post a photo. Here is information about pillowing (post #10): http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/?p=17300

Are you printing in a dusty environment? Most dust will not melt or burn until much hotter than 260C. If it gets on the filament it can get carried through the feeder, through the bowden and get stuck in the nozzle. Alternatively the ABS that the feeder is made out of can get ground down by the PLA filament and tiny flecks of black ABS can also make it's way to the nozzle. Usually 260C is needed to get that ABS out. I don't know if it is "high temp" ABS or what but I have a theory that it causes many clogs that people have been seeing with UM2.

I listened to both videos and hear nothing unusual. I think it's fine.

I don't know about command line. But there are 2 ways to make solid layers - one is set the skin to say 200mm. That works fine and gives you concentric fill. Or you can set the infill to 100% which gives you diagonal fill which alternates each layer. 100% infill is not much (any?) stronger than 50% infill but is heavier, uses more PLA and takes longer to print.

If the walls are .4mm thick meaning it only makes *one* pass and never goes back to the same spot on the same wall a second time and if there are no holes in the walls of the piece and no non-printing moves and no retraction then you can probably use the "spiralize" feature which adjusts the Z position very gradually along each layer so that there is no Z seam - every move includes a tiny increase in Z. However if your part isn't incredibly thin then you can't use spiralize and I'm not sure what you can do. I guess I recommend tuning the Z axis - try doubling the Z acceleration. Each doubling of acceleration means the movement is 1.4X faster (square root of 2) which means the blobs are 1.4X smaller. Increasing Z jerk also speeds things up. But if you increase acceleration too much you will lose steps and your part will be the wrong height. That's why you need to experiment - make long 10 to 50mm moves up and down and verify that the Z comes right back to the same starting point. I recommend pronterface to play with acceleration and to do the movements: printrun/pronterface/prontrface download: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/ Another way to shrink the blobs is to print slower so that there is less pressure in the print head. Try printing at half speed and see if that makes a difference. I don't know if your reprap has marlin but if so you can do this on the fly with feed rate control. I have found that printing at 30mm/sec with .1mm layers makes the Z seem almost disappear completely due to the pressure in the nozzle being so much lower. Another way to shrink blobs is to lower temperature so that the PLA flows more like toothpaste and less like honey. For example 190C might give you smaller blobs than at 220C (although this also raises the pressure which could paradoxically make the blobs bigger so lowering XY speed might be better).

It's the same procedure except it is very easy to destroy your bowden tube when you try to remove it. So my instructions are more detailed.

I think the default is retraction off. At least it was at one time. So that's definitely not good. Grab the bowden and lift it at the print head and push it down again. Mine won't move at all. But when my UM2 first arrived it moved up and down by about 1mm. Measure how much it moves up and down and then add 4.5mm and set that distance to your retraction. Originally I used 5.5mm retraction but now that the bowden is immobile I use 4.5mm retraction. Other than that use the settings Illuminarti recommends. Exactly those settings. One more thing - 60C can cause ugliness if the fan is off. Consider having the fan come on at 100% relatively soon - maybe by 1mm. By default I think the fan doesn't come onto 100% until 5mm. This is a very difficult print and I'm not confident you can get it much better but after trying everything Illuminarti said and after doing 100% fan on a lower level, consider trying .2mm layers to see if that helps. Sometimes you can get better results with .2mm when you have overhangs (and sometimes it's worse). 210C should be cold enough for this color blue and 30mm/sec should look noticably better than 50mm/sec. So do that also.