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It shouldn't be hard to get that back left cover off but I still think it's more likely on the bottom. But check in either order.

If you print straight on the glass you need to heat to at around 40 or 50C (or hotter - 70C is recommended but 50C is fine). Are you using a piece of paper during levelling? It should just barely touch the paper enough to be slightly tighter than completely loose. In other words once it is tight enough that you notice restriction in movement then you are close enough. Also it is best to level with a hot nozzle and a hot bed for two reasons: 1) hot things expand so you want to level with same conditions as printing 2) sometimes there is a tiny tiny blob of pla on the end of the nozzle. If that is hot then it shouldn't hurt your leveling procedure. I have only levelled my UM2 once about a month ago and haven't messed with the levelling since then!

11.5mm is with it closed and with filament loaded. Maybe your screw is too long? You should be able to get 11.5mm with filament loaded and feeder closed. You could also test the pull strength. The feeder should be able to pull 22 pounds of force on the filament.

I'm planning on printing the Eiffel tower also. Some day soon. It's on my list and getting close to the top of the list.

Not sure but ABS shrinks much much more. You need a heated bed or even a heated chamber to print anything more than one inch across.

Yes. Simply print 2 robots - that fixes the antennas. All the other tricks were not a secret. The antennas are a special case because they are so small and they don't have a chance to cool as the print head is almost always touching them.

This is a common problem on UM2. It is usually caused by bad solder here: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/3735-a-fix-for-ultimaker-2-heated-bed-not-working/

The meshmixer support is very good advice. I often have the "warping upward hit by nozzle" issue. It doesn't happen on vertical sided portions - only when things get wider - such as on the Y part of your support at the intersection of the Y. Once you are done with the intersection the two upper arms of the Y will be fine. It is caused because upper layers are shrinking and pulling hard on the lower layers. Because there is overhang the hinge point makes the edges lift upwards. When printing a cube there is no problem because the hinging means that instead the bottom edge will lift off the print bed (fixable with glue). So what is the solution? Well adding glue helps so that it is harder for the print head to knock it over. If you are watching the print, you can use a putty knife to push down on problem areas while printing. Temperature of PLA does not matter. The affect mostly occurs when cooling from around 80C to air temp. The best fix is a heated chamber. If you graph shrinkage (density versus temperature) PLA is very linear (not perfect but close enough). But PLA is still in glass phase down to about 50C so it is the last bit of cooling where it causes a problem (from around 80C to room temp). So the easiest thing to do on a UM2 is crank the bed temp to 70C. No hotter because PLA will start to melt any hotter than that. Even at 70C PLA is in a glass state. The next thing you can do is cover the front and top of the machine. And/or turn off the fan. Fan helps with some things (stringing, cooling small details faster, bridging) but hurts with other things. If you can get the ambient air temp from 20C up to 40C that will help quite a bit. If you can get it up to 70C you will have zero issues with shrinkage but you may overheat your stepper motors. 40C is a good compromise air temp with 70C on the platform. OR you can design everything so that it won't matter - make all support be the same cross section as you move up the layers.

I'm confused - are you saying the motor can't move it or that your hand can't move it? I guess it's time to loosen the grub screws and see where the problem is. If the long belts are too tight that could be a problem. More likely - something is hitting something in the area of the short belt.

There's a year's worth of changes to Marlin in there - and there are several updates every week. For example the "beep" sound when you use the menus is shorter - more of a click. There is this tweak zero height feature while printing thing also that's kind of cool.

It says "Y":

You must have disconnected the wiring to the Y motor somehow. You should remove the cover on the larger of the 2 panels underneath. There are only 2 screws holding it on. The cables are all marked - look for "Y axis" or something like that. The cables are all pretty tight - it was probably on the verge of coming off already.

You should already know your "R" number as that is Ultimaker's number for tracking your order. The number was created when you first paid for your order. It looks something like "R982349872". You can check DHL's website using that code here: http://www.dhl.com/en/express/tracking/shippers_reference.html Note that DHL works just as hard on saturdays and sundays so you will probably get your order Monday afternoon.

Printing slower and cooler tends to get better results. 200C is quite cold but is usually fine if you print at 30mm/sec or slower. The colder the temp, the thicker the PLA is (more like toothpaste than honey). So at colder temps you have to print slower because the pressure in the nozzle can be quite high. And high pressure means the quality won't be as good. You will get underextrusion. But I see ZERO underextrusion in your prints. They don't have that issue. It's more of a Z axis acceleration issue. I doubled my Z acceleration a while back and I love the results. If you have the ulticontroller, you can change the Z acceleration in there - then make sure you save values and power cycle the machine before testing it out. If you don't have an ulticontroller, let us know and we can help but the first step would be to install this software which reads the current acceleration when it connects and there are gcodes to change it: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/

260C is dangerously hot for PLA. If you let it sit long at that temp it is likely to boil and turn to gunk and clog your tip. This temp is okay when you are printing fast though e.g. 200mm/sec .1mm layers or 100mm/sec .2mm layers. If I'm not in a rush I print at temps between 190C and 220C.

What an interesting looking part! It looks like a house with a massive chimney. So... It's not supposed to rock like that? This is most likely a shrinking issue. The wider the part the more it shrinks. Because the width changes at different points, the shrinkage varies. I suspect if you print a cube you will not see this issue. I have certainly never seen this issue quite this way. If I print a cube it does not have a curved side like this! Consider printing this part hollow as the internal fill is partly responsible for pulling the sides in. Also consider maybe printing in a heated chamber. Close the front and put a box over the top and heat it up to 40C (much hotter and the steppers can't take it). Most of the shrinkage issues occur from around 80C cooling down to ambient air temp for that layer. So if you can heat the chamber even only 20C to 40C it makes a big difference. There is also special PLA that doesn't shrink but it only comes in black and white and it costs twice as much: PLA 45. For me personally - if I was the designer of this part. I would measure it carefully and give the model an inverse bow so that when I printed it, it would come out perfect. Then reprint in identical settings (same fan, same bed temp).

It looks like you are doing fine. Those videos show perfect first 2 layers. A piece of normal paper is .1mm so if you are levelling the bed and you are off by .1mm that makes a big difference so it is tough to get the first layer perfect but you managed it somehow. Also keep in mind that heating up the nozzle enlarges it by about .1mm. Also your print bed is not flat - it's warped a bit as I can see the first layer is thinner in spots where the print bed is higher but this is typical of the UM Original. If you really care about that (I don't) you can buy a sheet of glass. Read about "printing on glass" if you go that route. Now your photo of the top is not so good. It looks like underextrusion and also pillowing. The pillowing is probably caused by your non-standard fan shroud. Many people say to print your own fan shroud but the one that comes with the UM is outstanding. The fan that comes with the UM doesn't create much pressure - only speed - so it works terribly with constricted shrouds. Pillowing is a bizarre thing but every time, (EVERY TIME) people increase their fan the pillowing goes away. It's very complicated and I don't feel like explaining but I will if you don't believe me. The other fix for pillowing is to print 10 layers and eventually it usually fixes itself. But more fan is a better fix ("more cowbell!"). But your bigger problem is underextrusion on the top layer. I think tightening the spring might help. Make sure your filament isn't tangling. 11.5mm spring length when compressed is what I use - Illuminarti has a 11mm (he tighted it up a lot). You could have other feeder issues: knurled bolt isn't lined up to get a good grip, your black delrin plastic disk might be worn, there could be wood particles jammed in the feeder, etc. You might want to open it up and check it out - it should be able to pull 22 pounds if the filament hasn't reached the print head.

Your printer is more of a Ultimaker Original than a UM2 so I changed the title. The UM Original has gone through a few "revisions" but Ultimaker doesn't call it a "generation". There is a "direction" pin on the PCB. Do *not* choose Ultimaker2 in Cura as that will cause all kinds of problems. Choose "ultimaker original" and go to machine settings and adjust the distances. Don't update the firmware with cura because if you do then you will only be able to print 205X205X205mm. If that is too late - no big deal - you can build your own firmware here: http://marlinbuilder.robotfuzz.com/ Now to your "direction" problem. I recommend you install "pronterface". You can get it here: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/ Connect to your printer with that and you can then do small (10mm) moves with the x axis. There is a direction pin "dir" on the pcb. That signal might have a bad solder joint. Or it could be defective in the arduino output. Or you could have a defective driver (easiest to test because you can swap 2 drivers). Here is piece of the schematic showing the "dir" pin:

This is very common with the UM Original which is almost the same design. There are 6 pulleys on the Y axis and the 2 that are most likely the problem are the two on the "short belt" which is the belt that goes to the stepper motor. Tighten all 6 as tight as possible. Consider marking each pulley and shaft with a tiny dot with a permanent marker so you can see which one is slipping. Unfortunately one of the 6 pulleys is hard to get to - the one on the motor. You might have to remove the motor to get to it which probably means removing the cover also. There are other possibilities besides slipping pulleys (with your "lean" description the other possibilities go up from 1% to 30% likely). So consider putting one drop of light mineral oil (baby oil, 3-in-1, sewing machine, or even engine oil but not grease or wd40) on each of the X,Y rods and also with power off push the print head around with your fingers seeing if there is much higher resistance on Y axis. It's possible the Y long belts are too tight causing binding and excessive friction. Also after tightening the pulleys, if prints are still leaning, look carefully at the Y short belt as it moves back and forth - compare it to the X belt. See if you notice something different for example a twisting and report back here.

:(

Some businesses count week 52 and 53 as the same week. In other words anything up to dec 31 is week 52 but I can't speak for Ultimaker.

There are 11 combinations of using those checkboxes. Try all 11 before giving up. Usually one will work. Checking both "a" and "b" - don't do that as that is identical to checking only "b" (or only "a" - I forget - just don't check both). If none of that works you can try editing it using this procedure (meshlab is free): http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-remove-internal-faces-with.html

Ultimaker uses marlin and marlin is very configurable for many different types of printers so you can select which type of temperature probe you are using. Thermistors usually get damaged if they are hotter than 250C - at least the ones I've used in the past so I would expect a thermocouple to be more common. Start by looking at this wonderful Marlin builder and look at all the choices for the "extruder temperature sensor" http://marlinbuilder.robotfuzz.com/ And if the thermistor you want isn't in the table it's easy to donwload and build your own Marlin and add your own thermistor table.

On top left of this page click "gallery", then click upload. AFter you have uploaded all the pictures you will need, then make a new post and click "my media" next to smiley face. I think you have to have 3 posts approved in order to be able to do this. I think you have 4 so far so hopefully this option is open to you. Otherwise you can post on 100 different free sites such as: imgur, facebook, google groups, dropbox, etc. and then post a link to your picture(s).

I think they account for that as the entire part shrinks the same amount at the same time after printing is done. So they just print it 1% (or whatever the value is) larger. But with FDM things shrink as you are printing. So it is much more complicated.