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I'm glad you fixed the slipping Y axis. The non-smooth surface is caused by "underextrusion" or simply "not enough plastic". This is usually caused by printing too cold or too fast. If you are printing < 240C then increase the temp to 240C might fix your problem. If you still have underextrusion then slow down your print by 2X or make layer height thinner by 2X. For example go from 50mm/sec to 25mm/sec. Or go from .2mm layers to .1mm layers. Either of these changes will reduce the volume of PLA going through the tiny nozzle. If you watch as well as listen to the feeder you can see it skips backwards. The feeder is designed to do this on purpose if the pressure gets too high. If it didn't skip backwards it would grind the filament to dust instead which is much worse because then your print fails and you have to take things apart. This skipping backwards is what is most likely causing your underextrusion and again the fix is to print hotter and/or slower. There are hundreds of posts and experiments regarding this problem here - you may have a somewhat faulty printer (at least not as good as others) or it may be your filament is more viscous at your printing temps - so really the first thing to try is hotter temperature. umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/3976-almost-always-missing-layers-underextruding umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4586-can-your-um2-printer-achieve-10mm3s-test-it-here/

It looks like you Y axis is slipping a little bit from layer to layer. So your part is moving towards the front of the machine and then sometimes towards the back of the machine. When you have a sudden move it is usually caused by a loose pulley. But you have gradual - small move from layer to layer. This is almost always caused by the short belt rubbing near the motor. You need to remove the back left cover to expose the Y stepper motor and belt. I would remove the motor and maybe add some washers or something to get the motor farther from the side of the printer - or maybe move the pulley on the motor closer to the motor - the gap should be much less than a mm, but not touching. Maybe 1/2 or 1/4 of one mm. When you are printing - that belt from the motor up to the top shaft - if it is rubbing the wall you might be able to hear it or you might see it twist each time it changes direction - that would be more evidence that the belt is rubbing.

I see you used meshmixer for supports and that's great but they should be of larger diameter - about twice what you did. Also you used more support than necessary. On a level shelf overhang of less than 2mm you don't need any support usually. Just try it. On an overhang that is tilted more vertical than 45 degrees - well any crappy printer can handle that with no support. You can go much steeper - 60 degrees from vertical? No problem. 70? Surface getting a little rough maybe, 80 degrees? Um2 can still do it with .1mm layers but starting to look pretty crappy. 85-90 degrees? Well now you need some support if shelf is more than 2mm.

This is typical. In order for the pattern to repeat on each layer despite every layer possibly moving a bit each time, I believe Cura's infill pattern is anchored to the 0,0 point on the printer. So if you move a part a little bit, the pattern inside will be different. Anyway, you can always increase your infill - you have it pretty low - looks like 5 or 10%. Try 20% if you want more infill. I don't recommend going over 24% though. If you want strength, increasing shell is usually better than increasing infill.

Follow my directions above to get the fan power going, then jiggle all the connectors and wiring. Try to get the fans to come on and off repeatedly such that you know the exact connector that has problems. Then potentially take that connector apart and possibly solder the wires in or something.

They look great!

Very cool! I hope this gets as good as Cura someday! It would be great to have another slicer. http://webloria.loria.fr/~slefebvr/icesl/

What's your bed temp?

Did you see this? https://www.youmagine.com/designs/ultimaker2-cable-chain

PLA shrinks as it cools. The higher layers are pulling hard enough to lift the corners up. The simplest fix is to add brim. This keeps air from getting under the corner and also spreads the forces over a larger area. All the other fixes involve things like glue. You should be having a hell of a time getting your prints to come off the glass, not complaining about warping lifting the corners.

It's the distance the head sticks out beyond the nozzle. If you print something say 10mm high and then go off and print a different thing back on layer 0, you don't want any part of the print head and fans to hit the first object. The gantry height is the height to those X/Y metal rods than can hit the part even if the head itself is far away from the already-printed part. These distances are shown as a gray area on the print bead when you are moving parts around on it.

75C as default bed temp for PLA is a very bad thing. Should be 70C. Or lower.

Did you slide the layer slider up and down a few times to make sure it all looked perfect before you printed? I assume your problems are the slicer as this sounds very likely. Also did you play with the "fix horrible" settings in the expert tab? You might want to uncheck "A".

You should make sure your wall thickness is thick enough for two passes - so 1.3mm would be the minimum although with the threads being at an angle from vertical the cad software might be off by .01mm or so. So I would consider maybe 2mm as a minimum wall thickness for the threads.

The back fan cable I believe is also slightly longer. When I got my brand new UM2 I had this exact same issue. I just unplugged the two connectors and swapped them and got lucky on the first try.

I think blue light stayed on for 30 minutes once - I unplugged it and brought it to another room and threw it on a chair without plugging it in. I got distracted with another project and a half hour later came back and the blue led was still on - amazing. You can check the voltage of the power supply. It's supposed to be 24V. You can check it while you are printing. Consider doing this test to eliminate problems with the stepper and feeder: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4222-pulling-force-of-um-extruder/ Also consider removing the bottom cover to you electronics just to let it cool a little more. The larger cover.

Simply doubling the Z acceleration will make your blobs about half their current size. Some people call this "the Z seam" by the way. Another fix is to print much slower - if you are really picky about how your surface looks you can get better results at massively slow speeds. Like say 30mm/sec.

@Schafe - Acetone only dissolves ABS, not PLA. So while it may help, I find it better to put the whole thing in a hot flame (but not so long as to melt the copper) and burn all that plastic to ash. Then just tap the ash out or use the "Hot Cap" method or whatever you called it. @Schafe - I don't know if you can remove the nozzle that way (from the bottom). The unscrewing part will work. You certainly need to remove the fan bracket first. There is a vertical threaded screw like thing that also goes into the nozzle that holes in the two electrical components (heater and temp probe). I don't know if the elec component's wires are long enough to take it apart that way. Probably it will work though. On the other hand, unscrewing the 4 long screws and then pushing down on the bowden holder and pulling the bowden out really doesn't take long.

You can print this fine on the UM1 but it may be slow. First about retraction speed. If you have older firmware (very likely) 40mm/sec is the desired speed as that results in 20mm/sec. Using 30mm/sec may result in something very slow like 10mm/sec. You want the fastest possible retraction that the extruder can handle consistently. If you have a relatively new Cura such as 14.02 you can isntall the latest firmware that fixes these bugs and set the retraction speed to a speed around 20 25, or even 30mm/sec. Retraction distance: You want the minimum distance that brings the filament to the bottom of the tube without actually sucking air into the tip of the nozzle. If you print this you can do it in 4.5mm. If you don't print this you need more - maybe 5.5mm: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:46157 Stringing. Lower temp works better (less oozing/stringing) but this means you also then need to print even slower. Also every pla is different. Consider 30mm/sec and 210C maybe. I recommend doing the same experiment I did but in your blue pla: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/ There's no way to get really high quality bears without printing them very slow. These are quite doable on the UM Original but it may take 4 hours per bear! Even if they are only an inch across. I'm just guessing on the print times. Cura will tell you much more accurately.

If you do get a new PCB, get a new black block to replace yours with a big crack in it.

Use a meter to check those wires - check the resistance across them when they aren't plugged into the green block. It should be just a few ohms - somewhere between 2 and 10 ohms. Probably around 5 ohms. If it's more like infinite ohms then your problems is actually probably more on the print bed than here and you should resolder things there. But more likely you already spotted the problem so just screw the "pryed apart" wires back in tight and see if things are working again. You may have damaged the mosfet that turns the heated bed on and off. If so you will be able to verify that there is no voltage at this damaged green connector. The best fix at that point would be to get a new PCB from Ultimaker.

Nice, Jason. Please post a link to a recommended power supply also so people can estimate total cost necessary. You kit should include a 4.7K through-hole resistor to be soldered onto the UM Original board. Do you print directly on the aluminum plate or do you put kapton tape on it? Or blue tape? Or glass on top?

It's probably not a quality control issue. More likely it's a shipping/packaging issue. UM needs packaging that can handle being thrown off a moving truck at 100km/h and crushed under 1000kg of boxes. I think they have gorillas throwing around the boxes or something at DHL headquarters.

This one seems new to me. I don't think I"ve heard about this particular exact problem. Just a little explanation of how it should be working: The thermocouple goes up to a tiny circuit board on the print head. That board should be powered up (you can test it). The output signal from that board is a voltage from 0V to 5V where 5V is 500C and 0V is 0C and it's linear in between. So at room temp it should be around 20C and 200mv. Did you check those voltages there and also at the PCB under the UM? In the past people have reported problems where the temp is very sensitive to other wires near the thermocouple - before it gets to the tiny PCB on the print head. So keep those wires at least 1 cm away from the fan and heater wires. But once the voltage leaves the print head it tends not to be sensitive to noise but of course the wire can break and that's another common problem. So I'm surprised there would be an issue on the underside.

I recommend you do not buy a filament that wide. Have you considered PA6 nylon?