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Almost certainly it is the same. I base this only by looking at photos of UM filament and Form futura website (and other manufacturers). The black spools that the filament comes on are identical. And every other company out there has a completely different spool - all companies are unique as far as I can tell.

Mine looks like yours. It sticks out quite a bit. Just like yours. Maybe the threads are stripped (ruined).

I strongly recommend you do not buy filament that is truly at 3mm. Also I recommend printbl.com for filament in the USA. Good luck.

Again, if the problem is that the X axis only goes one direction I would put a meter on the DIR pin and see if it goes from 5V in one direction to 0V in the other. If it is always at 5V or always at 0V then the problem is usually a bad solder joint. Or a bad arduino.

The drivers should be clearly labelled and they pop off. The X driver is the closest to the X connector and so on. You can swap two. I'd like to see a video of what you are talking about. Bur from your words only - I think what you are saying is that the print head is fine until it hits and endstop and then tries to keep going. I don't know about the mingda but the normal UM is tough and it can handle this but it makes a horrible noise and shakes something awful. The cause of this is usually that the endstop isn't working. There should be 6 endstop switches. 2 on each axis. Really you only need 3 as the other 3 are done in software anyway. You can test them with power off - push the print head around and you should hear the click as it hits each endstop. If the noisy spot has no click then you can slide the endstop closer in so that it clicks before the axis gets to it's end. Alternatively the switch could be broken or it might not be plugged in at all. Or it could be, again, that the direction signal is broken and the axis ALWAYS goes the same direction. This indicates that the DIR signal is an open connection so the driver always interprets the signal to go the same direction. This is what I thought you said the problem is in the first place.

That gap - it looks like play. Usually play comes from the belts but it sounds like your belts are too tight if anything. Play/backlash can come from other things. With power off, place the head near the center of the machine. Then push the nozzle back and forth in X and Y. Does the nozzle move without the belts moving? You might have to hold a belt still to see if there is any play that needs quite a bit of force for it to take affect. If the nozzle moves a distance similar to that gap width in your photo - then that could be the problem. It could come from the bearings in the head. It could come from loose X,Y rods (the two that go through the head). It could come from the blocks that those 2 rods go through. It could be in the print head itself.

Slightly off? What do you mean? The color is wrong? It isn't centered in X but Y is fine? It is tilted? It is hovering over the bed? And which UI do you mean? Does simplify have a USB printing window? Are you talking about the simplify UI? Be warned that USB printing isn't officially supported on the UM2 as it is buggy and often fails part way through a print if it gets a bad signal through the USB.

This does not make sense. The tiny screw needs to be very very tight. I think you just aren't tightening it enough. Tighten it so much that you are afraid of breaking the screwdriver/hexdriver. The white roller should be close to the lowest tension - the white square that shows through the left side should be near the top.

It looks like underextrusion but I don't know why it would get worse at the top. You had retraction everywhere so if it had anything to do with retraction (such as retraction speed so high it missed steps on the extruder) then it should appear everywhere. Did you lower the temp further up? Did you crank the fan higher further up? Maybe the PLA on the spool got slightly more tangled and you were on the verge the whole time? Anyway to fix this kind of thing you can either extrude less PLA per second or you can raise the temp. Lower the speed will get you better quality overall so if you are patient then that is the better choice. If you are impatient like me then crank the temp to 240C and let the plastic flow! Of course you will get much worse stringing at 240C. Everything is a tradeoff.

Did you use "spiralize"? I still think it's a Z issue or possibly your bed is shifting side to side when changing Z. If these were 3mm apart (same as Z screw) then that would explain even more but these are only. My other theory was that your extruder wheel wasn't round so it would overextrude then underextrude but I assume the vase uses either more or less plastic than your previous part. And both parts have overextrusion every 5 layers. If the parts are different sizes and problem was extruder gear then the quantity of layers would change. So I still think this is related to Z somehow.

I wouldn't expect much stringing on this object because it doesn't have separate islands (but you never know with cura!). Actually the letters - those might have stringing. Anyway you can help the underextrusion two different ways - either slow it down or heat it up. Your choice. And when I say slow it down I mean 40mm/sec. And when I say hotter I mean 230C or even 240C. I'd be tempted to print 90% of it at 240C, 60mm/sec and then use tweakAtZ to switch to 30mm/sec at 205C for the letters on top.

It depends what is causing the underextrusion. If you are printing too fast and cold the PLA can't get out of the nozzle fast enough and there is a longer than usual delay when asking for "more pla!". So if it is printing slowly for a bit on one side and then speeds up on a longer side, the extursion can't catch up with the faster/longer print line. That's why printing slower fixes many many issues. Actually this makes a lot of sense in the picture with the green and red arrow. Maybe the green arrow is pointing at an underextruded "slot" and the head was travelling in the direction of the red arrow as it made that slot and in the second half (as it is decelerating) the extrusion finally catches up with demand and the slot gets gradually less prominent and recovers at the corner. Really Marlin should be smarter and anticipate this and overextrude a bit on the acceleration and underextrude on the deceleration to compensate but in practice this gets complicated as every PLA has different viscosity and every nozzle hole has a slightly different size and I'm sure there are other affects (like the formula would be totally different at different temperatures).

I mean I'm looking at the red and green arrows on your most recent photo and it looks to me like it goes inwards temporarily and then recovers. If you look at the part in real life is this true? This could be caused by underextrusion for a few layers.

So I'm going back over all your prints again. They look much better starting when you tightened the belts but you seem to have this horizontal line where there is underextrustion and then it recovers. The "displacement" in X and Y seems to be fixed, right? now you get a skinnier couple of layers. I think you are just printing too fast. Lower your print speed to 50mm/sec. My above print was at 50mm/sec, 225C (both green and blue prints).

Well I tried to print your puzzle piece and it came out fine. FINE. What the hell. Something strange going on here. I printed it on a cold bed (30C) because I didn't want a hot bed to help out. I printed in green transparent first and that came out fine so I printed it in a solid light blue color and that was fine too. The sides are perfectly vertical except for the "foot" at the bottom. Here's a picture:

Yes, that might work. You would have to do some calculations to make sure the feature is working for your intended spot. Lift might also create vertical spikes of PLA. That won't work. Look at the tip of your nozzle with a magnifying glass. It has a hole and then surrounding that hole is a flat area. That flat area has to be hot I believe because occasionally it is good that it remelts the PLA that it touches. Especially if it is trying to extrude a trace *wider* than the hole size (yes it does that sometimes! - strainge, right?). Even if it was okay to have the flat spot cool, how could you cool that tiny tiny flat area but still have the PLA hot coming out of the hole?

Can you post the gcode please? I want to look at it in repetier host. You can't post it on this website but maybe dropbox or some other website?

Use a saw or router bit to lengthen the slots if the short belts aren't tight. My long belts are pretty loose and it's fine. If you already have belt tighteners on the long belts then I bet the problem is with the short belts.

Also the pattern on the bottom of your part has tiny holes - you have two traces touching, then a gap, then the pattern repeats. This pattern and the wall gaps (red lines in second photo) are both indicative of the same thing - loose belts. Usually the short belts but it could be long belts also. Try sliding down x and y motors in their slots (is this UM original?). Here is an explanation as to why loose belts causes this problem: Look at posts #7 which shows the same problem if you zoom in on the picture and how they fixed it and also #8 which explains the phenomenom. http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/?p=14396 The Z gap I'm not sure about. Could be a slicing issue. Did you look carefully in layer view at that spot?

I added my own design heated bed and it is very heavy (1 kg). So that's probably why I have to level every day.

I don't think you need it for "enclosed volumes" as in this case it can just do bridging. Right? Or am I missing something due to my lack of imagination? I guess if you had a cube but with a dip in the top middle - *that* would be an example of an enclosed volume that needed support. Cura won't support that if you choose "support: everything"?

I still maintain this is a cooling/shrinking issue. Try printing it hollow. Don't worry about support - just do it hollow. I will print this part with a cold and hot bed on my UM2 tomorrow.

The screw you point to - I think you want to loosen it a great deal, then slide the knurled part inward, then tighten the tiny screw again. I have not take this apart yet myself so I may be ignorant.

Most ultimaker users use a slicer program called "Cura" which is open source and is actively developed by Ultimaker staff. The feature you refer to is called a "raft" in Cura. I have never used that feature. I print directly on the blue tape (on UM original) or glass (on UM2). In my opinion the raft is just an excuse for people too lazy to properly level the print bed. And on the UM2 it is very easy to level and I only had to level a month ago and it hasn't needed any levelling adjustment since then. On my UM Original I have to re-level every day. It kind of sucks.

Only 3 inches but I've seen 8 inches - it shouldn't be much worse at 8 inches.