gr5

You should go ahead and place an order for the UM1 kit. You seem quite smart and handy and patient and I'm sure you can put it together yourself.

Once you've printed a dozen experiments and played with the printer for a week, printing a 30 hour print is no big deal. Just do it. Just have the patience. It takes you longer than 24 hours to design a section so it should be okay to take 24 hours to print a section. Cura won't print anything less than 2X the nozzle width. e.g. with .4mm nozzle, if the part is tilted and is exactly .8mm thick the cross section will be slightly less than .8mm so it won't print. Other slicers might let you get away with this. You can lie about the nozzle width up to a certain amount - for example saying it is .3mm when in reality it is .4mm will work okay but the quality won't be quite as good (but not too bad really). I recommend you stick with .4 or .6mm. .6mm can push through 5(6/4)^2 or 2.25X as much volume of PLA so it can print about twice as fast. Illuminarty uses a .65mm nozzle. .8 is kind of extreme for a mere 8 by 8 by 8 inch bed. I also recommend you get the UM1 if you are going to be messing with nozzles. The nozzle on the UM2 is a single piece integrated with the heat chamber. You can't just easily change nozzles. You have to remove the thermocouple, remove the heater unit, swap out the assembly, and reinsert. This is *not* easy. Both the heater *and* thermocoulple are delicate and tend to fuse to the chamber after a few months. On the UM1 it is easy. (well some people have had trouble after a year or two of never removing it but I had no trouble). You heat it up, unscrew it, screw in a new one. Takes 2 minutes.

This suggestion - air on the nozzle - makes sense until you realize the nozzle was *more* stable at full speed. So... I think the problem is electrical interference. When you set the fan speed to 180, the fan is turned on and off many times per second. This causes strong high frequency spikes in current which causes voltage spikes (noise) especially in wires that are parallel with the fan wiring. Your new fan is probably more inductive or more capacitive than the existing fan. The fix would be to separate the fan cabling farther from the temperature probe cabling. The temperature wiring is already twisted pair which helps but isn't good enough as they two signals don't go through a differential amplifier like they should but instead one side is grounded and the other goes into the arduino. Even better shield the power cable to the fan with a grounded shield. Or just always use 100% fan. I find that 100% fan gives the best results.

If you do that I suspect you need to publish the source code also with the same license. Is that okay for you or are you working for Makrbot and need everything closed source?

Wait - what? What? You have a bowden popping off a UM2???? I haven't heard of that before. I thought the extruder was too weak. If you pull real hard how much force does it take? The UM Original feeder can push 22 pounds of force so obviously the bowden should be MUCH stronger than that. You should be able to pick up the machine by the bowden - either end. At least I can on my UM Original - just tried it. The UM2 might be heavier.

Pretty much anyone you ask here has a UM Original so they are all going to be biased towards it. It works. You can get one much faster (probably just a week but certainly less than 2 weeks - they are probably ready to ship sitting on a shelf unlike the UM2s which are about 5-6 weeks wait for now). Ask Illuminarti in a month or a year when he's printed many things on his UM2 (which he doesn't have quite yet).

It's pretty safe. Just do it. You can always change it again later.

Thanks. I will point people to this link next time someone needs tweakAtZ.

Is the stepper noise when you first turn on power? Or when you first start a print?

I got my Ultimaker Original Kit a year ago. I ordered it and it showed up faster than I expected. I didn't have to call anyone. I didn't have any problems. Could that be the fan on the bottom of the UM? It can be *very* noisy and the sound often stops after a few seconds. Many people have had trouble with that fan. You can remove the sticker and add a drop of oil if it gets worse. You can purchase a better one. I still have my original fan and if it gets noisy I hit my UM and the sound usually stops.

You mean this version control??? https://github.com/RicardoGA/Cura-Plugin/ You can either: 1) Email your version to ricardoGA - his email is in his profile 2) create your own github, check out his version into yours, commit your update, and then send him a pull request to merge your changes into his version 3) Create your own github and post it on this list. Or do you mean does Daid have this plugin in version control? Actually the official teakAtZ plugin repository is here: http://wiki.ultimaker.com/CuraPlugin:_TweaktAtZ So you could submit a pull request to "smorloc". Anyway, before you do any of that, can you provide a link to your updated tweak-at-z plugin please?

You have to enter the Z height EXACTLY. The first time it sees this new Z value it inserts the plugin code. Look at the gcode with and without the plugin running. The gcode is easy to read as it has lots of comments explaining the layer number and such.

Explain more details. Does it fail connecting USB? Does it fail the limit switch tests? Everyone at UM Support speaks dutch. There are nice people there who can help you and are in your time zone. They have been very busy but are finally caught up and would be happy to help you. I suggest you call them tomorrow. Do you have a voltmeter? The voltage should be >10Volts. I think 19V. You could disconnect the connector at the fan and measure the voltage. If you have the Ulticontroller you can turn the fan on with that - set it to 255 (full fan). Normally the fan doesn't come on until the second layer of printing (this is setting in Cura).

It's certainly possible. Actually any time you have retraction, if you think about it, you are sliding PLA upwards which also brings heat upwards. The warm/hot PLA is moving up to a cooler section of the print head and transferring some heat up there. then it goes back down and *now* the part of the print head just warmed up heats the higher up PLA and on the *next* retraction you transfer the heat higher up again. Only a little heat is transferred each time. But that 3rd fan should help prevent this from getting to severe. More likely in my opinion is that the 3rd fan on the print head is broken. I'm pretty sure it should always be spinning when you heat up the nozzle. The purpose of that is to keep the nylon pieces from melting and also to keep heat from getting up towards the top of the print head assembly.

I'm confused - that pink part you printed - was it ABS or PLA90? It was ABS, right?

Cool! I want to get me that stuff... However you are confusing humidity with % by weight. Some people think 100% humidity means you have 100% water and 0% air. But no, 100% is when you can't add any more water (as a gas) to the air and adding any more water will be in droplet (liquid) form. At 100% humitidty, 1 cubic meter of air at 30C holds 30 grams of water And the air alone weighs about 1200g So even if humidity is at 100%, this is only about 2.5% water by weight (that's normally how you do it -- by weight). So if your goal is to keep water under .02% then the humidity only needs to get down to .8% to have the *air* .02% by weight. I'm not sure how this translates to qty of water in PLA though. But getting humidity down to 1% should help a lot!

Heated bed mostly just helps with the sticking to the print bed. The temperature drops quickly as you move up. You will probably need to enclose your UM if you want to make a different that far up off the print bed. But, yes, a HB should help. If you get a HB, consider also moving your X and Y steppers *outside* the UM (no holes need to be drilled, nothing needs to be purchased). It will be noisier though as the steppers will be touching the wood directly. You'll have to reverse the direction. One way to do that is to just build marlin with the axis direction reversed (checkboxes for that here): http://marlinbuilder.robotfuzz.com/ Then cover the 3 open sides with plastic and the top with a big box (need space for the bowden). There you go - heated chamber.

Hopefully the jumper issue will fix your problem but if not... Changing the Marlin won't help you change the steps per mm. You can *ask* your printer how many steps per mm the Z is set to, then you can double that value, and save it back into your machine. Actually I would use pronterface (free) to send the gcodes: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/ M503 <- tells you current settings of your machine including steps/mm for z axis (probably 533) M92 Z1066 <- sets steps per mm for z axis to 55 (but only temporary until rebooting of machine) M500 <-- stores that setting permanently into eprom

That is mostly true but with the below bridges (150mm!) there is clearly some gravity interaction that would be fixed if the printer was on it's side: http://www.3dgeni.us/a-bridge-too-far/

If you end up sanding it down, adding filler, and priming and painting - it will probably look great. If you do post the final print please!!

Sorry you don't have your own printer where you can just run it overnight. A lot of the bumpouts - like on his bum -- those can be reduced by slowing down the print: See photo of the orange pumpkin here: http://umforum.ultimaker.com//index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/?p=24010 Also going to thinner layers (was that .2mm? Try .1mm) will improve the overhangs - for example the chest. With .1mm layer each layer above is touching more of the layer below and you get a cleaner/better look. But doing these 2 changes will turn your print probably into a 10 hour print. You can speed it up quite a bit without any loss of quality (very likely) by not doing any infill. Just set it to 0. This will save you lots of time. From the rear view the right leg looks better. Probably it had more fan on it. For this reason some people add a second fan on the other side. And the UM2 comes with a fan on each side. But again, printing slower helps just as good as having more fan.

The man and girl model was already scaled to 63mm tall. So it was only roughly 10X scaling. The guy alone was scaled to 7.46mm in sketchup (had to rotate him to vertical so I did it in sketchup instead of cura and scaled while I was at it). I also had to modify the porsche a little so I scaled that in sketchup also and the jeep (aka land rover) I also scaled in sketchup. All of these parts were found in various places around the internet. Two decimal places seemed plenty accurate to me for the roughly 1/10th scaling. I think I scaled the people to be 6 feet tall as close as possible.

Perhaps you had under-extrusion due to printing too fast/cold. It would be nice to see a photo of what you mean. .2mm at 50mm/sec is obviously twice the volume of PLA going through the print head than .1mm at 50mm/sec. So the extruder has a harder time keeping up and if the head is slowing down at corners for example you tend to get over extrusion approaching the corners and under-extrusion when it is back to full speed. Again, please post photo? I think I can barely see it on the left edge of the blue pillar base. Some interesting stuff about ringing here: skip to post #8 (post numbers are shown on the right edge) http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/2532-prevent-ringing-wobbly-surface-after-sharp-corners/?p=18006

If you are printing something larger than your smallest finger with a .25 nozzle - well - then you have more patience than me! These links are pretty good - but I think the first link is better. .3mm nozzle on ultimaker - finer but slower: http://www.tridimake.com/2013/05/3d-printing-with-smaller-nozzle-diameter.html .2mm nozzle http://www.printrbottalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=2584

It looks like you had under-extrusion for a few layers. One possible cause is if the filament tangles. Another explanation is if you got "bad" filament that is at 3 or 3.1mm instead of the standard 2.85mm. Try measuring the filament although the diameter may only be bad in one spot. Too bad you didn't catch the problem on video. :( The glue stick and heat will help the corners from cooling but won't fix the reason the print failed. Note also that at one point you have a cylinder sticking out the side of your part and the bottom didn't print well as it was printing in "mid air". If you can change the cad so the bottom of the cylinder angles a little you might get a better result although if it were me I would just fix it afterwards with a file.