gr5

Yes! Please post a picture or a link to amazon (which would have a picture) or whatever. You mentioned you are in California. It would be very helpful if everyone would do what I did - at the top right click on your nickname drop down, select profile, select edit, and under "location" enter something like "Bay Area California" or even just what country you live in. That way when someone says "I've never heard of isopropyl alcohol" and I see they live in the UK I can respond with helpful information. Also it's nice to meet people who live in the same area and potentially meet them at makerFaire's and so on.

Everything white in this picture is HO scale (1/87 real life) for my nephews train set. The man on the far left - when it got to his head it just never turned solid so his head is a ball of mush. I printed the next 3 people at the same time but there was massive stringing to remove even though I printed very slow and cold (25mm/sec 190C). I had to remove lots of strings with the dremel. Still I am easily pleased and hope he likes these people. The Porche and the Jeep came out great though. The orange bits near their waists must have come from my previous print (background). I guess sometimes it takes a long time for some of the pieces to dislodge and fall into the flow of molten plastic.

Well Weiin has been bugging me to make a robot "as good as the one on his friends machine" (which is not an ultimaker) but he won't tell us what the settings are. Nick Foley managed to do amazing results and he didn't want to share with weiin how he did it. He privately told me the trick and asked me not to reveal until Weiin tells us the settings his friend used. I think I managed to make a UM robot as good as Weiin's friend but I'm kind of annoyed he won't take the trouble to find out what the settings were for his friend. So this is motivation for him to tell me ("I'll tell you if you tell me"). I have pm'ed several people what the "trick" is and it only helps antennas so it's not all that useful. I published all the other settings except for this one trick. Other people have published the trick at other times but I had never tried it before. See this HUGE thread here and here: ("since when did um users stop caring about print quality?") https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ultimaker/rx4t5ADCc8U And this thread on the forums: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/3038-can-your-ultimakerultimaker2-print-such-quality/

If it were a grip issue it wouldn't be springing backwards (like in the video). It is springing (and spinning) backwards because the PLA filament in the bowden tube is like a big compressed spring and once it slips a little it moves back quite a bit until the pressure is relieved.

Well that's completely different. Before your tape wasn't sticking well enough. Now it's the part. Could you show a photo of the part? Or a cad drawing? did you use Brim? Lots and lots of brim? Brim makes a huge difference sometimes but it's important to get high flow or very good first layer - you can't have any air gaps. The PLA is held down by the van der wals force (I assume) and once you lift the corner it's over. The Brim helps this quite a bit. Also there are things you can do to the model. For example, solid infill is the worst thing you can do as those solid inner layers pull very very hard as they shrink. So a more open part (e.g. 20% infill or put vertical holes in the part as part of the design) can help quite a bit. Also having the bottom 5mm be completely vertical or sloping inward helps. Like a pyramid so that the stresses are pulling, but not lifting. Having the bottom few layers angle outward (for example a curved corner along the edges is bad) makes it lift easier.

Wow! The arms look better also!

Yes, I can see your stepper is slipping. It doesn't have the power to push hard enough on the filament. The first thing you should fix is it looks like you have the white indicator of pressure at the maximum. That should be closer to the minimum to get more power. It seems counter intuitive but other's have said this so I assume it to be true. So turn the screw so that the white indicator moves up until it is more near the top. This force causes friction in the motor I assume. Secondly you are probably printing too fast or too cold or too thick. Try not going over 2mm^3 per second at 210C or 5mm^3 per second at 10mm^3. So if you are doing thick layers (.2mm) at 100mm/sec (with the standard .4mm nozzle) that works out to 8mm/sec (2X4=8). This is difficult at a temp less than 230C. So try going slower, or hotter, or thinner layers. As Robert asked, What is your layer height, temp, and print speed?

Wait. I think that's wrong. I must be thinking of stainless steel. Never mind.

And for the Ultimaker Original I also set these to 0 so I can do it on the machine.

Keeping track in software would only give you accuracy to a few meters or so. I think you want accuracy down to a few centimeters maybe. Same with weight. I switch filaments often and don't want to have to tell Marlin everytime I switch. Plus I often turn the extruder wheel by hand as do most UM original owners. But it would be a nice feature to run the filament through a cotton tube to clean dust off the filament to prevent clogs. This tube could also be attached to a switch to detect when you run out of filament. Very simple!

Yes, push on the wheel to select an item. On the bottom, you might want to remove the smaller cover which covers this assembly and see if there is a bad solder connection or hanging wire or something obvious near the encoder (the wheel is called an encoder).

I'm not sure what ferromagnetic means but I think Steel doesnt count. I know magnets stick to iron, but not steel.

Load your model into cura and select a nice thick layer at first to speed things up: maybe .3mm but I would slice at .1mm before actually printing. On the top right of cura you can change views. Look at XRAY view first. Anything in red is not "manifold" as Daid put it. Daid wrote Cura so he is the expert. Anything in red *might* be a problem. You can often fix these by just checking "fix horrible" in expert settings in cura but sometimes that makes it worse. Anyway, anything in red, pay careful attention to those spots when you look at the model in "slice" view. Slice view shows blue lines for movement only (non extruding) so you can kind of ignore the blue lines. Look at all the layers. Take your time and particularly look at the red areas and the thin walls (torn up cloth) to see what the printer is going to do.

And I don't work for Ultimaker at all. I'm a user. Despite what it says over there on the left - I am a moderator for this forum but not an employee of Ultimaker.

fr/feedrate... It's the X,Y speed. First understand that before there were 3d printers there were milling machines. Feed rate was basically how fast you "fed" the material to be cut through the cutter (router/milling bit). In the Ultimaker, Feed rate is the speed of x,y,z or e axis (e is extruder axis). In practice movements use tiny E and Z movements but large X,Y movements. So the speed of X,Y is the limiting factor for feedrate. So typically people print at 50mm/sec or 100mm/sec. That is the feedrate. The feedrate on the ulticontroller (or in Cura print window) increases or decreases that speed (the XY speed). If your feedrate is 100mm/sec, the print head can actually move up to 141mm/sec in a diagonal as the feedrate is the maximum speed for the 4 axes taken individually.

If you save your profile as an ini file and look in there - pretty much anything in there can be a {} tag in your stat or end gcode settings.

Well UM1 people are often plagued by clogged nozzles which is similar to this issue. These printers aren't like 2D printers now where everything works so well.

This exact thing happened to MANY people which switching from 13.03 or older to 13.04 or newer. The "flow" setting used to be a scale factor and now is a percent. So what used to be 1X (1.00 or 100%) is now .01X (1%). If you are going to jump over the 13.03 version hurdle you should definitely go all the way to 13.10. In 13.04 it's called "flow (%)" and should be "100".

It works for me. Printed something with major retraction over the weekend.

Welcome to the life of an "early adopter"! :???:

In the picture it looks like under-extrusion. Raise the temp to 240C. It works wonders. And as Daid says, lower the fan speed until you've printed the first 5 or 10mm. You know you can change speed and temp *while* it is printing right? If printing from SD card you can do that with the knob on the UM. If printing from Cura you can do both of those in the cura print window.

So then, what is your layer height? Instead of getting mad at me, or mad at Ultimaker, consider this an interesting problem that can probably be easily fixed. It *sounds* like you are printing too much volume of PLA per second but maybe not. Please tell us the temperature, the thickness and speed. You may have a nozzle clog or maybe the current to the stepper needs increasing, but you might also just be printing too fast (I know the UM2 can print 300mm/sec just fine but that's at .05mm layer height, not .3mm layer height). I don't understand why you aren't will to experiment and lower the print speed to 50% to see what happens while you are printing. Or raise the temp to 240C. This is NOT an Ultimaker 1 and so the settings are going to be different. It may be that there is more air hitting the nozzles on the UM2 and you might have to print at higher temps then you expected.

Ha! I bet you are a bit frustrated that you don't have your UM2 yet!

Here is mark's gallery: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/gallery/album/262-ultimaker2/

Mark, to upload a pic, go to gallery, upload there, then make a posting and click "my media" to insert those into a posting.