gr5

In the USA, printbl.com is excellent. I think it's a secret. But I'm pretty sure it is colorfabb.com. If you look on their web page and also on ultimaker web page you will see the spools that hold the filament are very similar.

The two side fans on the UM2 are hooked in series to 24V so they each receive 12V. Although if one shorts out the other will receive 24V. Also this means if one fails in the open state the other will shut off.

Yes, rotate the z screw by hand - you will need to clean the grease off your fingers afterwards. Also unplug the big powersupply until the blue light goes off (may be more than 5 minutes!) and then plug it back in. I think it might have a safety feature where once it detects an overload it stays off until a power reset.

Which version of Cura? In cura 13.11 go to "machine settings". I think maybe you have to check the box next to "Machine center 0,0". I think this might fix this: I don't know if Cura knows how to print the x3g format - I doubt it. I would stick to replicatorG for the final printing step after converting to x3g. The way Cura detects the baudrate and the way Cura detects if there is a printer is by sending a gcode and waiting for the response. So this will not work with an x3g format printer. So you should use cura *only* to slice and create the gcodes. Then convert to x3g (binary format). Then print with replicatorG.

OH! I thought he meant the first layer was rough. PICTURES PLEASE!

I don't know about replacements but you can peel back the paper and add a drop of oil. That will probably help greatly.

Oh - and when printing PLA and printing that slow you shouldn't have to mess with the flow.

Do you have a picture? um1 or um2? The first layer is very difficult to get perfect because having the bed flat *and* level is hard. I recommend the first layer be .3mm if you can. You need a first layer Z height accuracy of about 1/3 the height of the first layer. So if your first layer is .3mm then you need to level plus or minus .1mm error (the width of a sheet of paper). But if you print the first layer .05mm - well then you need accuracy of plus or minus about .02mm. That's pretty much impossible with the plastic bed as it has warps in it larger than that. So it just can't be done unless you have glass or MIC6 aluminum. Anyway you probably need to relevel after every print or at least once per day. Here is my levelling procedure for UM1: How to level: leveling here is defined as setting the Z height and also leveling. It's one procedure that does both at once. Optionally heat up the nozzle to 180C because a cold nozzle shrinks and you will be setting the bed to the wrong height. Make sure tip of nozzle doesn't have any plastic on it or you may level to the wrong height. I usually prefer to level with a cold nozzle but if you want extra accuracy then use hot nozzle. If you have a heated bed that should also be warm for the same reason. Home the z axis only. If you must home all 3 then you need to disable the steppers once it's done so you can move the print head by hand. Move the head as close as possible to each of the 4 screws in turn. Once at a screw tighten the screw and then slip a piece of paper between the nozzle and the print bed. Make sure the paper slides very freeley. Then loosen the screw until the paper gets slightly stuck. You want the paper to easily be able to slide in and out under the nozzle with one hand pushing the paper. If the paper gets stuck it's probably too tight under there. While levelling try rocking the bed across both opposite diagonals to see if one of the screws isn't touching the bed and to see if the bed is "hung up" or stuck on the threads of a screw instead of on the screw head. Repeat this procedure for the other 3 screws. Then go back to the first screw and repeat on all 4 screws again. Then repeat on all 4 screws again. Then again. It may take you 20 minutes to do this the first time but the second time you do this it should take much less time because you are both better at it, faster at it, and because there isn't much to adjust the second time. Note that the act of putting the screwdriver in the head can apply weight to the bed and change the height. You have to be careful to put as little weight as possible when testing with the paper. If you leveled with a cold nozzle you are done. If you leveled with a hot nozzle you should then loosen the 4 screws 1/8 of a turn to compensate for the thickness of the paper. Once done leveling rotate the z screw by hand to keep the nozzle off your bed. This makes it less likely to damage your bed surface and gives the nozzle room to leak. On a new ultimaker repeat this procedure before every print (at least every hour) because the print bed can move/droop like a new guitar string. After many months the droop slows down.

The head never leaves the top so the PLA never has a chance to cool enough to become solid. What temp were you printing at and were both side fans running? Assuming those settings are reasonable, the next trick is to print two of these at the same time - place two into cura and then under "machine settings" set the gantry height to zero which forces both prints to print simultaneously - that way each part has time to cool while it prints the other. Also make sure you don't have "support everywhere" turned on for this part. You can probably almost get by with zero support. Personally I would but a little support in the CAD model instead of letting Cura do it. Is there any chance you can lay it flat on it's back? Or is the back side as complicated as the front side?

The rear fan should always be on and it comes even before the lights. It should be quiet. What country do you live in? Illuminarti lives in USA and he found one quickly. It would be nice if you added your country to your profile settings.

It sounds like a fan. But it looks like the head fans are off. The 3rd fan should be on however. If you simply turn your printer off and then on, the 3rd, rear fan should come on and the axes should be loose. You should be able to grab the print head and push it around. See if you can duplicate the noise. If so see if it comes from that 3rd fan.

I got the impression from another posting that if you merely tighten the screws it fixes the problem (2/3 of my posts are just re-posting something I already read here - sometimes I feel that's all I offer - repeating what other's say).

All robots done by my on my UM2. To zoom in to above pictures, first click on a picture, then right click and choose "view image" then click again and it should be bigger than your monitor (1500 pixels wide). The robot on the left was done with the robot slice that came on the SD card so I don't know the settings. It involved a hot heated bed at 70C. The robots on the right were printed on blue tape on the glass. The blue tape was washed with isopropyl alcohol so the robots would stick well. They were printed at 205C at 20mm/sec and then lowered to 200C when the printer got to the support structure for the robot's hands. I don't remember if I did .1mm or .2mm layers. If you have 2 robots one printed .1 and one .2 you can count the layers on these robots' shoulders and figure it out.

You can definitely print the UM robot just fine on the UM2. I recommend re-slicing with Cura 13.11. Try printing slow. Try 40mm/sec or if you want flawless perfect quality go to 20mm/sec and 190C. But 214C at 40mm/sec should give you a large improvement. .2mm per layer is fine. .1mm per layer is fine also but will take longer. I'll post a picture in the next post...

If the PLA is wider than the inside of the tube, no amount of oil will help. You could try reducing the pressure on the feeder so that PLA stays more round I suppose. Personally I would just throw it away. Or purchase a larger Bowden. A few people have purchased larger Bowden tubes. I don't remember the details.

I think everyone who has a UM2 will have to spend some time unclogging a nozzle some day. Fortunately I haven't had to yet. This means everyone who has a UM2 will hate it - on that day that they get a clogged nozzle. But hopefully that will pass. It's very unfortunate that this happened to you peter on your first day. I watched a UM employee unclog a UM2 head under pressure in about 3 minutes. He kept the nozzle hot and unscrewed the 4 screws and it happened so fast I don't know what happened after that although it involved some metal tools (small screwdriver maybe?) digging out the clog. Personally on my UM Original I removed the nozzle completely and brought it over to a gas stove and burned everything out and used wires to unclog. Daid says every UM2 should possibly ship with an acupuncture needle to clean it out (push the clog back the other way). Some people own a .4mm drill bit that they use to clean it out (while the nozzle is hot). In my experience I would get the nozzle to work for only 10mm of filament and would repeated reclog until finally I got the object out the back - whatever it was just wouldn't fit through the .4mm hole. I used a copper wire strand removed from a power cord - fished it through and pulled out out the other side bringing pla and such out.

You could set it to zero maybe? .5mm of filament at 2.85mm diameter is the equivalent of a 250mm string of filament .1mm high (125mm if .2mm layers). Are you sure you printed more than 250mm since the previous retraction?

Great idea! Please add this as a feature request for Cura gadgetfreak. You can do this here: https://github.com/ErikZalm/Marlin/issues

Drilling PLA is more like melting PLA. The friction causes it to heat so fast you never really get to the cutting state so much as pushing around soft pla with the drill bit. Unless you dip the drill bit in ice water every 3 seconds. If you want to use metal M3 (3mm) threads (the small bolts that come with the UM and UM2) you can set the hole diameter to 3mm and it will print a bit small and the 3mm screw will self tap screw threads nicely. Not as strong as using a metal bolt but pretty decent.

What the hell? Mine is set to 2.5mm I thought that was too little! Really? 4.5? I think I might change mine to that as 2.5mm just doesn't look like enough - the filament is still pushing up on the top of the bowden tube arc.

They are *almost* cut but not quite. I don't think that's the problem. No - look at that big black cable bundle at the top right corner - inside there are 2 gray ribbon cables plus other stuff. Those 2 gray ribbon cables are the problem. I think.

These look like different layer numbers. Can you show the same layer in each photo instead?

That is *much* tighter than my belts. Probably twice the force. Maybe 3X the force (my belts really aren't that tight and I get great results). Although that is about the same as the tension on my UM2. As far as acceleration is concerned I use 5000mm/sec on my UM original. I don't think I set that myself but that's what it's been for many months. At this point I think your hardware is fine. The next thing I would try is raising your print bed so that the first layer lines are squished more. I would go up about .05 to .1mm. Try turning each of the 4 screws counter clockwise by about 1/8 of a turn. Looking at your photo the plastic should be squished more so that it stays where it's supposed to go and doesn't pull inwards to the center of the circles. If the PLA is squished a little flatter into the blue tape and the contact outside is still bad then I would just blame Cura for not compensating well enough on bottom layers and just increase the infill overlap from 25% to 75%. But I have to tell you - the UM can do this. I printed a cell phone case with a UM Original back in August and it came out great. However because of the complicated nature of what I was doing (changing filaments) I was printing .4mm off the bed but Cura thought it was .2mm off the bed and I had flow at 200%: https://www.youmagine.com/designs/galaxy-s4-ballistic-case#!design-comments?data-id=208 Actually in the above photo it was at 150%. I did it again with 200% and it came out better.

Be aware that if you change XY acceleration using ulticontroller (or pronterface) the change is not saved such that when you power cycle the UM it will go back to defaults. There *is* however a save command to save it permanently (M500 maybe?). Also acceleration of 800mm/sec/sec is very rapid (I think 5000 or 8000is the default?) and not much different from the default. Whereas an acceleration of say 30mm/sec/sec is quite noticeable and might be more reasonable for bridging tests. Think about it: at 800mm/sec/sec, within one second the head could be moving 800mm/sec! To get up to 100mm/sec it takes only 1/8 of a second.

printing over USB is fine for quick prints but it is unreliable so don't try anything that will take over an hour because the chances that it will fail are much more likely and the amount of time lost is higher. In other words - expect print jobs over USB to stop part way through once every few hours for no apparent reason. Other than that printing over USB is fine.